Impact of mobile operator consolidation on unit prices

We evaluate the impact of mobile operator mergers on the unit price of data and voice by using country-level observations on retail revenue for data, cellular data traffic, retail revenue for voice, and outgoing voice minutes. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we estimate the effect of operator merger by comparing the difference between the non-merging countries and the merging countries before and after the introduction of the operator merger. In accordance with the theoretical prediction provided in this paper, we empirically find that mergers tend to decrease the data unit price and increase the voice unit price.