Antitrust Enforcement and Firm Performance : Evidence from Colombia’s Sugar Market

This paper examines the impact of two interventions by Colombia's competition authority to enforce competition in the sugar market on firm performance in downstream sectors. Using an exogenous identification strategy, the analysis finds that following the competition authority’s intervention against collusion in 2015, downstream firms expanded production but did not increase productivity or profitability margins, consistent with the removal of supply constraints imposed by cartelization. In contrast, the 2011 intervention against abuse of dominance increased the profitability margins of downstream firms, without altering production scale or labor intensity, consistent with input price reductions and stable consumer demand. Robustness checks, including propensity score matching, confirm the reliability of these findings. The results show that antitrust enforcement works through different channels, depending on the type of anti-competitive behavior. The results also highlight the importance of targeted and continuous antitrust enforcement in addressing market distortions.