Private versus Public Antitrust Enforcement: The Case of Chile

This article measures the impact of Fiscalía Nacional Económica (FNE), the agency responsible for enforcing competition law, on the outcome of antitrust trials in Chile. Using statistics on lawsuits since the inception of the new Competition Tribunal in 2004, we find that involvement of the public agency increases the probability of obtaining a guilty verdict in an antitrust lawsuit by 40 percentage points. Conditional upon a verdict, prosecutor participation raises the likelihood of a conviction by 38 percentage points. The results are robust to possible selection bias by the public agency. The prosecutor is likely to take part in cases involving sensitive markets and in accusations of collusion. The state-related character of the accused entity, in addition to its size, does not affect the probability of agency intervention.