Impact of roaming regulation on revenues and prices of mobile operators in the EU

We use a difference-in-differences approach to assess the impact of the EU roaming regulation on mobile operators’ average revenues per user (ARPU) and the retail prices of mobile services. Our results suggest that due to the regulation the ARPU of EU mobile operators decreased since 2007 on average by 9.1%. When considering purchasing power parities, the decline of ARPU is estimated on average at 5.8%, but in this case we cannot reject that there was no decrease at all. We also find that the impact of the regulation on ARPU depends on traffic imbalances, which may be related to tourism flows, and has a stronger negative impact on operators from countries with a surplus in tourism traffic. There is however no difference in the impact of the regulation on cross-country and national operators. Moreover, our results suggest that the Roam Like at Home (RLAH) regulation implemented in June 2017 had no impact on the tariffs of national mobile plans.