Mergers and innovation: Evidence from the hard disk drive market

This paper is a retrospective evaluation of how innovation changed following mergers and subsequent policy interventions after the 5-to-3 consolidation of the worldwide hard disk drive industry in 2012. It adopts a holistic view of innovation, employing four different measures: R&D, patents, the number of new models, and their unit prices. This allows us to distinguish the magnitude of the merging parties innovative efforts from the productivity of those efforts. Our firm-level approach confirms that there is important heterogeneity across the players, which we attribute to differences in the severity of remedies required by competition authorities.