A Large-Scale Evaluation of Merger Simulations

We would like to acknowledge Nikhil Agarwal, Isaiah Andrews, Allan Collard-Wexler, Mike Dinerstein, Jacob Dorn, Glenn Ellison, Igal Hendel, JF Houde, Alessandro Iaria, Sarah Johnston, Robin Lee, Ariel Pakes, Rob Porter, Mar Reguant, Tobias Salz, Chris Sullivan, Pietro Tebaldi, and Daniel Xu for useful feedback, as well as seminar audiences at the 2025 Econometric Society World Congress, the Chicago IO Fest, 2026 ASSA Meetings, the BU/BC Green Line IO Fest, Duke, Calgary, Harvard/MIT, Purdue, the UChicago Advances in IO Conference, and the Triangle Micro Conference. Lorenzo Magnolfi and Gloria Sheu provided helpful discussions. We are grateful for excellent assistance from numerous research assistants; a list can be found in the acknowledgments in Bhattacharya et al. (2026). This project was funded by grants from the Center for Equitable Growth and the National Science Foundation (SES-2116934). Researcher(s) own analyses calculated (or derived) based in part on data from Nielsen Consumer LLC and marketing databases provided through the NielsenIQ Datasets at the Kilts Center for Marketing Data Center at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The conclusions drawn from the NielsenIQ data are those of the researcher(s) and do not reflect the views of NielsenIQ. NielsenIQ is not responsible for, had no role in, and was not involved in analyzing and preparing the results reported herein. José D. Salas coauthored this article as a PhD student at Northwestern, before joining Cornerstone Research. The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors, who are responsible for the content, and do not necessarily represent the views of Cornerstone Research. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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