Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt Education Merger

Compass Lexecon was retained by Helene Jaffe and Fiona Schaeffer of Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP on behalf of their client Houghton Mifflin which sought to acquire Harcourt Education, in a merger that would create the nation’s largest K-12 educational publisher. Dan Rubinfeld served as the lead economic expert on the case, supported by Rick Flyer, Mark Israel, and a team in the Chicago office. Together, they developed an econometric analysis of the relationship between instructional material prices, margins, and market structure, with which they demonstrated that the merger would not result in higher prices or otherwise harm competition. Shortly following the presentation of these results, the U.S. Department of Justice cleared the merger without requiring full compliance with its Second Request and with no other conditions.