New collection of Frontier bulletins

Our new Spring collection of bulletins are now available to download, and share a theme that is familiar to many - the importance of attention to detail in regulation and policy-making. The effects of government policy and regulatory intervention can be complex, but unless they are thoroughly understood the results can be surprising, as we find in areas ranging from regional development to postal services and mobile telecoms.Location, location, location describes a recent joint study for Her Majesty's Treasury, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Department of Trade Industry in which Frontier questioned whether regional policy over the decades can claim to have made any significant impact on regional economic differences.Two of our bulletins cover the area of mobile telecoms: Patching up the waterbed refers to the vivid image used by the Competition Commission in its 2003 report on access charges in mobile telecoms to describe how pushing down one set of prices through regulation could result in a "bulge" appearing elsewhere. As other European regulators start to grapple with this issue, we explain why rigorous modelling is essential for understanding how big any bulge could be. Phone a friend looks at a specific issue within the debate about access charges. In many countries mobile-to-mobile access charges are set above cost, and the price of mobile phone calls to subscribers on different mobile networks is higher than calls to other subscribers on the same network. This raises a question about the incentives for mobile network operators and how large networks relate to smaller rivals. Frontier?s modelling work challenges the regulatory view that large operators may use high charges to foreclose their competitors.The last bulletin in our latest collection, Front of the envelope, describes how detailed calculations can be used to understand the potential impacts of changes in postal charges on different types of households in the UK. Understanding such incidence effects is essential in liberalised sectors, and while modelling is often considered complex, we demonstrate it is far from impossible.