Collusion through Common Leadership
This paper studies whether common leadership, defined as two firms sharing executives or board directors, contributes to collusion. Using an explicit measure of labor market collusion from unsealed court evidence, we find that the probability of collusion between two firms increases by 11 percentage points after the onset of common leadership, a ninefold increase over the baseline rate. These results are not driven by closeness of product or labor market competition. Our findings are consistent with the increasing attention toward common leadership under Clayton Act Section 8.
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Copy CitationAlejandro Herrera-Caicedo, Jessica Jeffers, and Elena Prager, "Collusion through Common Leadership," NBER Working Paper 33866 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w33866.
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