Evaluating a Decade of Mobile Termination Rate Regulation

Christos Genakos () and Tommaso Valletti

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: We re-consider the impact that regulation of call termination on mobile phones has had on mobile customers' bills. Using a large panel covering 27 countries, we find that the "waterbed" phenomenon, initially observed until early 2006, becomes insignificant on average over the 10-year period, 2002-2011. We argue that this is related to the changing nature of the industry, whereby mobile-to-mobile traffic now plays a much bigger role compared to fixed-to-mobile calls in earlier periods. Over the same decade, we find no evidence that regulation caused a reduction in mobile operators' profits and investments.

Keywords: Mobile telephony; termination rates; waterbed effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D43 L5 L96 L98 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-ict and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1282.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Evaluating a Decade of Mobile Termination Rate Regulation (2015)
Working Paper: Evaluating a decade of mobile termination rate regulation (2014)
Working Paper: Evaluating a decade of mobile termination rate regulation (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1282

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().