The growing popularity of leniency laws to cope with collusions, a toxic by-product of capitalism, warrants empirical investigations on its effectiveness. Has it achieved its goal in enhancing competitions among businesses around the world? Operationally, we show that leniency laws significantly drive firms in 64 countries worldwide toward more vigorous competition as evidenced by their strategic responses. In the short run, operational efficiency of firms in countries that started introducing leniency laws (in comparison to comparable matched firms in countries that did not) suffers. Specifically, they were driven to extend their credit terms, an effective combating move that while presenting short-term penalties to total asset turnover, signifies an immediate response to anticipated level of stronger competition. For long-term vision, firms also adjust themselves by optimizing fixed asset utilization, indicating a sustainable approach in maintaining their competitive edge in the market where benefits of once being in a cartel were lifted. These findings are more pronounced among larger and more profitable firms. Empirically, as leniency laws implementations in sample countries are staggered in their occurrences, we employ the recently moderated Difference-inDifferences (DID) imputation estimator to minimize biases from 'negative weighting' inherent in standard DID approaches.