Introducing new PhD candidate: Joséphine Thorson

Background: Joséphine Thorson has recently joined BECCLE: her main research interests are within merger control and her current PhD project deals with “Killer acquisitions in EU competition law”. Joséphine holds a Master’s degree in European business law from the University of Paris Panthéon-Assas. Before joining BECCLE, she was at the General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (“DGCCRF”) of the French Ministry of Economics, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty. Joséphine’s practical experience gained at the Office of Competition Law and Policy, in matters of antitrust, merger control, international and particularly European cooperation in competition law and policy and EU lawmaking will constitute an asset to BECCLE.

Project: In her Ph.D. project (2023-2026), Joséphine is looking into the application of EU competition law in relation to the phenomenon of “killer acquisitions”. Both in the EU and other jurisdictions, killer acquisitions are currently debated: the project aims not to develop on the economic theory, but to take the phenomenon of killer acquisitions as it has been analysed in that theory and put it into the context of competition law.

Joséphine will investigate the scope of and criteria for administrative EU competition law merger control (which legal criteria should be employed to define what is subject to pre-merger control?) but will mostly focus on the legal assessment of mergers (do the current substantive tests employed to assess which mergers should be cleared and which should be blocked fit to assess those types of acquisitions?) as well as the application of other parts of competition law to mergers (is merger control the only/correct tool to asses killer acquisitions with regard to their specificities? Should, for instance, a killer acquisition be considered abusive conduct?).