Who Was Here in 2000

The modern market was still missing. Its predecessors, people and antitrust cases provide the starting point.

Leath · April 2026 · 10 min read

Origins: 1945–2000

Britain’s economics-consultancy sector has two useful lineages. Macro forecasters and university model-builders grew with post-war demand management. Microeconomic and regulatory boutiques expanded with privatisation in the 1980s. They meet in the year-2000 snapshot. This is an organising device, not a claim that every firm followed one path.

The institutes came first. Britain’s oldest independent economic-research body predates the war: the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) was founded in 1938. Reformers including John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge created a charity independent of any university or party, financed by Rockefeller, the Pilgrim Trust, Leverhulme and Halley Stewart. Its quarterly National Institute Economic Review began in 1959; its NiGEM global model has run since 1987.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies followed in 1969. Four private-sector men incorporated it on 21 May 1969: banker Will Hopper, investment-trust manager Bob Buist, stockbroker Nils Taube and tax consultant John Chown. They wanted expert criticism of tax policy from outside government. Here the IFS is mainly a source of talent, not a competing consultancy. John Kay became director in 1979, then founded London Economics in 1986; other alumni also moved into consulting.

The post-war settlement created demand of one kind and suppressed another. Telecommunications, gas, electricity, water, rail and airports sat in government departments or public corporations. There were no licensed private companies bargaining over revenue caps. Competition policy relied on public-interest tests and qualitative analysis. The Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission began on 1 January 1949. It became the Monopolies Commission under the 1956 Act, gained merger powers in 1965 and took the name Monopolies and Mergers Commission under the 1973 Fair Trading Act. Econometrics was scarce; government and universities supplied most economic advice.

Demand management produced a distinct trade: rival university forecasters selling subscriptions to companies, the City and Whitehall. Sir James Ball joined London Business School in 1964, built a computerised UK model and ran its Centre for Economic Forecasting. A co-creator of the Oxford Econometric Model with Lawrence Klein, Ball became “the King of Forecasting”. Patrick Minford founded Liverpool’s Research Group in Macroeconomics in 1976; its operational rational-expectations model forecast from March 1980.

By the late 1970s, NIESR, LBS, Liverpool and the Treasury produced competing forecasts. Their “Battle of the Models” peaked after Geoffrey Howe’s Budget of 10 March 1981, when 364 economists wrote to The Times in protest. The episode marks the weakening of the demand-management consensus and the movement of forecasters into the City, government and commercial research. It does not prove a single causal route from the 1981 dispute to every later consultancy.

Commercial macro consultancies followed. Former Treasury forecaster John Walker founded Oxford Economic Forecasting, now Oxford Economics, in 1981 and distributed its Global Economic Model on floppy disks. Cambridge Econometrics was incorporated on 28 May 1985 from Sir Richard Stone’s Cambridge Growth Project. Tim Congdon started the monetarist Lombard Street Research in 1989. Douglas McWilliams founded Cebr, incorporated on 18 March 1991 and dated by the firm to the early 1990s. Capital Economics arrived in 1999 under Roger Bootle, HSBC’s former group chief economist.

The regulatory strand had older American roots but arrived later in Britain. Jules Joskow and Irwin Stelzer founded NERA in New York on 10 April 1961, with advice from Alfred E. Kahn, to apply microeconomics to regulation and litigation. NERA entered London during Thatcher’s privatisations, though NERA UK Limited was incorporated only on 17 April 2000.

Stephen Littlechild’s February 1983 RPI–X report on BT provides the main demand-side marker. Oxera was set up in Oxford in 1982 for the privatisation programme; London Economics followed in 1986 and later seeded Frontier Economics in 1999. The institutes supplied talent and independent analysis. Privatisation supplied paying clients. By 1 January 2000, both lineages appear in the source set.

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Press play, or drag the slider, to watch the macro-forecasting lineage grow firm by firm. Vertical dotted lines mark each wave’s shocks. The first are the 1976 IMF crisis, the 1981 Howe Budget and 364-economists letter, and ERM exit in 1992. Later markers show Bank of England independence in 1997, the 2008 financial crisis, the OBR in 2010 and the 2016 Brexit vote. Hover or tap any bar to see who founded it.

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Independent research institute Academic forecasting group Commercial consultancy Acquired / corporate-owned

The two faint arrows show key personal moves: Paul Ormerod's path from NIESR, via the Henley Centre, to Volterra in 1998, and IFS to London Economics in 1986 (John Kay). Founding dates are reconciled to Companies House and to each institute's own history; Cebr is dated to its 18 March 1991 incorporation. Sources are listed at the foot of this article.

1 January 2000

On the first morning of the new century, Britain’s small competition-economics trade sleeps in Holborn and Oxford. Derek Ridyard has spent 13 years at NERA, running European competition work from Marsh & McLennan’s London office. He will leave in April 2002 to found RBB Economics with Simon Bishop and Simon Baker. John Bridgeman is in his fifth year as head of the Office of Fair Trading. Bank of England chief economist John Vickers will replace him on 1 October. Derek Morris is nine months into chairing the Competition Commission, after leading its predecessor since 1998.

Nearby, Frontier Economics is eight months old. Its founders, S Gaysford and D M Elliott, have around 20 consultants; P J Burns, M G Webb and Z Biro will join the board over the following year. Colin Mayer, Peter Moores Professor at the institution that became Saïd Business School in 1996, having joined its predecessor in 1994, remains formally attached to Oxera, the Oxford boutique founded in 1982 for privatisation work.

In August 2000, Charles River Associates will open its first London office with around 15 staff. Three vice-presidents will lead it: Christopher Doyle in telecoms, media and e-business; Robert Laslett in financial services; and Michael Walker in competition policy. Walker, an alumnus of Lexecon and British Telecom, has just co-written The Economics of E.C. Competition Law with Simon Bishop. Twenty months later Bishop will follow Ridyard to RBB. Their book will reach three editions and become a regular EU competition reference. The visible senior layer is still small.

Compass Lexecon, the CMA, Ofcom, Berkeley Research Group, Keystone Europe and AlixPartners’ London economics practice do not exist. Nor does CRA’s London office. RBB is 27 months away. Capital Economics is about a year old, renamed on 13 January 1999 by former HSBC chief economist Roger Bootle. He is its sole director. Speeches, articles and presentations to a short subscriber list will produce £265,908 of turnover for the year ending 30 April 2000.

In January 2000, the source set shows four established names, roughly 200 consultants and a small recurring cast of senior economists. After 25 years it contains a 90-firm catalogue, a disclosed turnover floor above £2 billion, private-equity valuations and an RBB FY2025 highest-paid-member line of £5.77 million. The series explains the gap. This article begins with the people already in the room.

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The four firms this series starts from

NERA, the default option

Jules Joskow and Irwin Stelzer founded NERA in New York in 1961. The applied microeconomists saw money in advising regulated utilities on American rate cases. Stelzer opened London in the 1980s for a richer seam of work: Thatcher’s privatisations. Gas, telecoms, water and electricity companies needed valuations, unbundling and new regulators. By 2000, NERA’s High Holborn office had roughly 80 professional economists and was a default choice for regulation and competition work.

Marsh & McLennan had owned NERA since 1983, alongside Mercer and the rest of its consulting empire. That mattered in 2002. Ridyard, Bishop and Baker left not an independent boutique but a listed American insurance broker’s subsidiary. A partner-owned breakaway offered something different.

The senior London list was short. Derek Ridyard, at NERA since 1987, ran European competition economics. Simon Bishop specialised in mergers and market definition; Simon Baker in coordinated effects and cartels. Irwin Stelzer hovered above them, writing weekly for The Sunday Times and advising Rupert Murdoch. His London role was more totemic than operational. The future RBB founders already worked together.

Lexecon, the Chicago brand's London cousin

Richard Posner, William Landes and Andrew Rosenfield founded Lexecon in Chicago in 1977. Posner was then a Chicago law professor and later a federal judge; Landes was a colleague and Rosenfield a former student. Daniel Fischel and Dennis Carlton joined soon after and became public faces for three decades. Nextera Enterprises bought the firm in 1997.

In January 2000, London’s Lexecon Ltd was different. Bill Bishop founded it in 1991. It shared a brand and early affiliation with Lexecon Inc, but remained legally separate. The connection gave the London firm a visible Chicago School association; it did not make it an American branch.

FTI Consulting acquired Lexecon in 2003 for roughly $130 million. It bought COMPASS in 2006; Robert Willig of Princeton and Janusz Ordover of NYU had founded that firm in 2003. FTI merged the two in 2008 as Compass Lexecon. None of this had happened in 2000. Lexecon Inc was a respected American firm; Lexecon Ltd its separate, brand-linked London namesake.

LECG, the network firm

David Teece, a New Zealand-born Berkeley professor of industrial organisation and corporate strategy, founded LECG in California in 1988. Its model differed from NERA and Lexecon. Senior academics were affiliated experts rather than employees. They supplied the economics; LECG supplied case management, billing and a nameplate. The elegant arrangement worked for a decade.

LECG had a London office by 2000, but its European practice grew later under Jorge Padilla. Recruited from NERA Madrid, he rose to run Europe and later chaired Compass Lexecon. LECG floated on Nasdaq in 2003. The shares faded; in 2011 the firm began selling practices and winding down the listed shell.

Padilla’s team moved to Compass Lexecon. Other London alumni scattered. A year before the collapse, Teece founded Berkeley Research Group and later absorbed many former colleagues. LECG’s bankruptcy is an important hand-off in the project chronology and the subject of Part 3.

Oxera, the Oxford boutique

Oxera was founded in 1982 as “Oxford Economic Research Associates”, a spin-out from Oxford’s economics department. It grew alongside NERA London to serve Thatcher’s privatisations. Colin Mayer, later Oxford’s Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies, chaired it from 1986 to 2010.

Derek Morris is sometimes confused with Oxera because of the Oxford address. He actually chaired Oxford Economic Forecasting Ltd, now Oxford Economics, from 1984 to 1998. He then chaired the Monopolies and Mergers Commission from 1998 and its successor, the Competition Commission, from April 1999. By then Mayer was back in academia. Oxera’s operating leadership passed to Luis Correia da Silva and Helen Jenkins, who became joint managing directors after a 2003 management buy-out and led the next decade.

In 2000 Oxera had perhaps 40 consultants and remained centred on Oxford. It specialised in utility regulation for Ofwat, Ofgem’s predecessors and Oftel before Ofcom. It chose to be a boutique and stayed one.

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The regulators as talent factory

There was no CMA in 2000. The 2013 Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act created it, and operations began in April 2014. In 2000, two bodies divided competition work. Their economists later supplied many private boutiques.

Bridgeman had run British Alcan Aluminium before John Major’s government sent him to the OFT in 1995. Bank of England chief economist and MPC member Vickers succeeded him on 1 October 2000. A former Oxford professor, Vickers later chaired the Independent Commission on Banking in 2010 and became Warden of All Souls in 2008.

Morris was another Oxford economist. He chaired the MMC from 1998, moved to the CC when it replaced the MMC in April 1999, served until 2004 and later became Provost of Oriel College. Both men moved between regulation and academia, unlike many later CMA-era careers in the project file.

Inside the OFT, Margaret Bloom served as Director of Competition Enforcement from 1997–2003. In 2002 she became a professor at King’s College London’s Centre for European Law; in 2003 she joined Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. Her path prefigured later moves by Amelia Fletcher at UEA and Chris Pike, formerly of the OECD and now at Fideres. Together the OFT and CC employed perhaps 50 professional economists in 2000. Private consultancies would recruit heavily from this pool.

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The three cases that shaped the decade

Airtours / First Choice (2002)

In 1999 the European Commission blocked the Airtours/First Choice merger for “collective dominance”: tacit coordination without a smoke-filled room. It was an early, prominent use of coordinated-effects economics in a European merger. Airtours appealed. In 2002 the Court of First Instance annulled the decision, producing a lasting merger-control precedent. Lexecon advised Airtours on the appeal. Work like this helped boutiques build London practices.

Microsoft EU (2004)

The Commission investigated Microsoft’s bundling of Windows Media Player and tying of workgroup servers from 1998 to 2004. The long case trained junior economists. Economics shaped both liability and remedies; NERA, Lexecon and LECG all took roles. European antitrust was becoming a transatlantic industry, not merely a Brussels legal speciality.

Virgin Atlantic / British Airways loyalty rebates (1999–2003)

Virgin Atlantic challenged British Airways’ travel-agent rebates under Article 82, now Article 102 TFEU. The Commission fined BA in 1999 and the CFI upheld it in 2003. The central economic question was when a discount becomes an abuse of dominance. NERA, LECG and Lexecon built European practices around such cases.

All three put economic theory near the centre of European enforcement or litigation. Airtours also showed that courts would test, and overturn, the Commission’s reasoning. The next generation of boutiques arrived to meet this demand.

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The first breakaway: April 2002

In April 2002, Derek Ridyard, Simon Bishop and Simon Baker left NERA London with 13 colleagues, including Andrea Lofaro: 16 economists in all. Global Competition Review supplied the enduring headline: “Top economics trio leave NERA in the lurch.” Their initials formed Ridyard, Bishop, Baker: RBB.

The practice began trading in April 2002. Its current LLP, OC315356, was incorporated on 26 September 2005, three-and-a-half years later. It now files from 199 Bishopsgate.

The 2002 spinout set a template. A senior team leaves together and takes juniors: 13 at RBB, creating a cohort of 16; more than 25 at Econic Partners 23 years later. The new brand avoids one founder’s surname. RBB in 2002, Fingleton Ltd in 2013, Flint in 2015, Pragmatix in 2020 and Econic Partners in 2025 all echo the pattern. Frontier and Vivid began differently, but belong to the same founder-led retreat from the 2000 incumbent map.

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What the 2000 cohort looks like now

Of the 14 named individuals in this piece, where are they in 2026?

Most of the cohort are retired, emeritus or part-time advisers and academics. Derek Morris, after seven years as Oriel’s Provost, is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall. Four remain active in the market: Padilla at Compass Lexecon, Teece at BRG, and Bishop and Baker at RBB. Ridyard stopped consulting in 2018 to join the Competition Appeal Tribunal.

The founders are mostly out of the room. Their successors include the CMA-drain cohort in Part 6: Coscelli, Hunt, Calanchi, Sala, Walker and Bon. They were graduate students or junior case handlers in 2000. They now inherit the market.

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Why the market looked nothing like today's

Three absences distinguish 2000 from today. First, domestic firms lacked scale. MMC owned NERA; Nextera owned Lexecon, later bought by FTI; LECG was American and would list only in November 2003. Oxera was independent but small; Frontier was eight months old. In 2000, large visible firms tended to have foreign parents. Today they mix US platforms such as FTI/Compass Lexecon, BRG, AlixPartners and A&M with domestic independents including RBB and Baringa.

Second, there was no private equity. The first project row is LDC’s Capital Economics stake in October 2014, 14 years after January 2000. Partnerships and foreign companies dominate the earlier record. A nine-figure buyout valuation for a specialist economics firm would have sounded strange in 2000.

Third, there was no unified regulator. The OFT handled cartels and consumers; the Competition Commission investigated markets and imposed merger remedies. Oftel regulated telecoms and the Independent Television Commission broadcasting; Ofcom did not exist. Ofwat oversaw water and the Rail Regulator stood alone. Ofgas and OFFER already worked jointly before the Utilities Act 2000 established Ofgem.

The CMA combined the OFT and CC in 2014, making the modern route from CMA economist to consultancy more visible. In 2000 that route was smaller and informal: from the OFT or Competition Commission to NERA, LECG, Oxera or another adviser.

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