Mario Monti adds more firepower

But this month the commission gets its first chief economist, Lars-Hendrik Röller, and the agency’s hope -- one not shared by merger candidates -- is that he will be able to invoke economic insights to end the commission’s legal losing streak. “I do hope that our economic analysis is sufficiently solid to help prevent such court verdicts,” says Röller.

Röller, 45, does not like to lose in court -- or on a court, for that matter. The son of former Dresdner Bank chairman Wolfgang Röller, he attended Texas A&M University on a tennis scholarship before going on to earn his Ph.D. at Wharton.

Röller and a team of ten economists he’s assembling will vet the work of commission project teams to ensure that their reasoning is economically sound. The new chief economist is viewed as a pragmatist who will devote his energies to assessing prospective mergers, not developing elegant, abstract theories about monopolies. “One of my principal objectives at the commission is to improve the link between economic theory and empirical facts,” says Röller.

But those yearning for a softening of the commission’s aggressive antitrust stance under chairman Monti will be disappointed. “My role is not to make final decisions,” Röller says. “Those will be taken as they always have been.” That will be a disappointment to General Electric and Honeywell, to name just two frustrated merger partners.

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