Análise ex-post dos efeitos sobre preços e oferta da fusão gol-webjet

Abstract

CADE’s (the Brazilian competition authority) decision of approving, approving with restrictions or rejecting a merger can be understood as a public policy. Parting from this understanding, an ex-post evaluation literature on decisions concerning economic concentrations by competition agencies has been created. In order to bring such discussions to Brazil, the present master thesis aimed to evaluate a concentration approval decision by CADE: the acquisition of Webjet by Gol. With the purpose of achieving this objective, the thesis has studied: the theoretical economic and legal framework of a business concentration, the Brazilian airline market between 2001 and 2012, the judgment and the arguments used by the judgerapporteur of the Gol-Webjet merger for its approval, as well as a review of the literature on the airline industry and on ex-post evaluations of competition agencies’ decisions. ANAC's (the Brazilian aviation agency) "Tarifas Transporte Aéreo Passageiros Domésticos" database was used, carrying out some treatments on it, in order to, firstly, examine the data from graphical and before-and-after descriptive statistics analyses of the concentration approval by CADE. Furthermore, the concentration was evaluated by using the difference-in-differences econometric model (DiD or diff-in-diff). In conclusion, it was found that the South region reported the highest increases in prices of its airfares, followed by the Southeast region and, after that, the agglutination of the North / Northeast / Central-West regions. In relation to the Brazilian aggregate, results pointed to an increase in airfares and average yield fares were found. Regarding the effects of the concentration on the supply of airline seats, concerning the regions and the Brazilian aggregate, the placebo robustness tests of the DiD model reduced the argumentative strength of the results found, hence, suggestion a decrease in the supply of airline seats in all regions analyzed on the air routes directly affected by the Gol-Webjet concentration. When analyzing the air routes affected by the merger individually, due to data granularity problem, one cannot have specific conclusions about the routes or the behavioral antitrust remedy applied at Santos Dumont airport. Therefore, although some results have been found, a general and definitive conclusion is impossible to be reached.