Justice Department antitrust chief Bill Baer will deliver the keynote address at the American Antitrust Institute’s 17th Annual Conference on June 16 in Washington DC.
Bill Baer
AAI’s 2016 Annual Conference is titled Living with Market Concentration? New Perspectives on Merger Policy. It will be held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
The plenary panels and breakout sessions will focus on merger enforcement against a backdrop made more complex by the wave of recent consolidation, growing evidence on the effects of previous consolidation, and challenges posed by merger remedies.
The conference will highlight several major and frontier issues in merger enforcement.
Northeastern University Professor John Kwoka will discuss the growing challenge of merger remedies from his latest book Mergers, Merger Control, and Remedies (MIT Press).
Penn State Law Professor Beth Farmer will moderate the afternoon plenary panel on mergers with international dimensions.
Breakout sessions will focus on critical, evolving, and innovative issues, such as the role of economics in antitrust analysis, defining markets around customers and channels, competitive effects and bargaining power, private merger litigation, and broadening the lens on merger review.
Baer will deliver his keynote address at the conference luncheon that begins at noon.
Baer was sworn in as the Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division on January 3, 2013, following confirmation by the United States Senate.
Prior to his appointment as Assistant Attorney General, he was a Partner and Head of the Antitrust Practice Group at Arnold & Porter LLP in Washington, DC, with extensive experience in both criminal and civil antitrust investigations, including merger and acquisition reviews by antitrust enforcement agencies in the United States and globally.
From April 1995 until October 1999, Baer was the Director, Bureau of Competition at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
As director, he supervised the antitrust law enforcement activities of 220 staff in the Bureau of Competition and 170 staff in the FTC’s regional offices and oversaw significant enforcement successes, including blocking mergers in office supply and drug wholesale markets.