The year the UK economics-consultancy market did not yet exist in its modern shape, a portrait of the legacy firms, named people and antitrust cases this series uses as its starting point.
The independent UK economics-consultancy sector did not arrive in one piece. It accreted, over roughly four decades, out of two distinct lineages that only later converged: the macro-forecasting institutes and university model-builders that grew up under post-war demand management, and the micro-and-regulatory boutiques that the privatisations of the 1980s called into being. The year-2000 snapshot that anchors this piece is the point where those two strands had largely fused; understanding it means starting with the older of the two.
The institutes came first. The oldest independent economic-research body in Britain predates the war itself: the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) was founded in 1938 by a group of reformers including John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, funded by four charitable foundations, Rockefeller, the Pilgrim Trust, Leverhulme and Halley Stewart, and constituted as a charity independent of any university or party. Two of its outputs anchored UK forecasting for decades: the National Institute Economic Review, published quarterly since 1959, and NiGEM, the global econometric model first developed in 1987. The Institute for Fiscal Studies followed in 1969, incorporated as a limited company on 21 May 1969 by four private-sector men, the banker Will Hopper, the investment-trust manager Bob Buist, the stockbroker Nils Taube and the tax consultant John Chown, who wanted expert critique of tax policy from outside government. The IFS mattered less as a competitor than as a feeder: John Kay became its director in 1979 before leaving to found London Economics in 1986, and many alumni later moved into private consultancy.
What gave these bodies their reason to exist was the post-war settlement itself. Most of the network industries that now generate consulting demand, telecommunications, gas, electricity, water, rail and the airports, were nationalised, run as government departments or public corporations rather than as licensed regulated companies with revenue caps to be negotiated. Competition policy existed but worked through public-interest tests and qualitative analysis: the Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission was set up on 1 January 1949, reconstituted as the Monopolies Commission in 1965 and the Monopolies and Mergers Commission in 1973. Systematic econometric work was scarce, and what economic input there was came mostly from in-house government economists or directly from academia.
The demand-management consensus instead produced something distinctive: rival university forecasting groups selling subscriptions to firms, the City and Whitehall. Sir James Ball, recruited to London Business School in 1964, built a computerised UK model and ran it through the LBS Centre for Economic Forecasting; co-creator with Lawrence Klein of the Oxford Econometric Model, Ball was later dubbed "the King of Forecasting". In 1976 Patrick Minford founded the Liverpool Research Group in Macroeconomics, building the first operational rational-expectations model of any national economy, used for forecasting from March 1980. By the late 1970s four UK models, at NIESR, LBS, Liverpool and the Treasury, were producing competing forecasts. That "Battle of the Models" came to a head at Geoffrey Howe's monetarist Budget of 10 March 1981, after which 364 economists wrote to The Times attacking it. The episode broke the last residue of the post-war consensus on demand management and accelerated the migration of forecasting talent out of the universities, into the City and into the Treasury, the talent pipeline that fed every later commercial firm.
The first commercial macro consultancies emerged in the dozen years after that Budget. Oxford Economic Forecasting, now Oxford Economics, was founded in Oxford in 1981 by John Walker, a former Treasury short-term forecaster, distributing its Global Economic Model on floppy disks. Cambridge Econometrics was incorporated on 28 May 1985 as a spin-off from Sir Richard Stone's post-war Cambridge Growth Project. Tim Congdon founded the monetarist house Lombard Street Research in 1989, and Douglas McWilliams founded the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr), incorporated at Companies House on 18 March 1991 and dating its founding to the early 1990s. Capital Economics followed when Roger Bootle, formerly Group Chief Economist of HSBC, founded it in 1999.
The other strand has an even earlier global root but a later British one. NERA (National Economic Research Associates) was founded in New York on 10 April 1961 by Jules Joskow and Irwin Stelzer, with advice from Alfred E. Kahn, the first consultancy explicitly dedicated to applying microeconomics to regulation and litigation. NERA opened its first non-US office in London timed to the Thatcher privatisation programme, though the UK legal entity NERA UK Limited was not incorporated until 17 April 2000. It was the privatisations, beginning with Stephen Littlechild's February 1983 RPI–X report on BT, that created the private market for economic advice the post-war state had never needed. Oxera was set up in Oxford in 1982, explicitly born of that programme; London Economics followed in 1986 and would later seed Frontier Economics in 1999. The post-war institutes had supplied the talent and the habit of independent analysis; privatisation supplied the market. By 1 January 2000, both lineages were in the room.
Press play, or drag the slider, to watch the macro-forecasting lineage grow firm by firm. Vertical dotted lines mark the events that shaped each wave: the 1976 IMF crisis, the 1981 Howe Budget and the 364-economists letter, ERM exit in 1992, 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.
The two faint arrows show key personal moves: NIESR to Volterra in 1998 (Ormerod and Rosewell), 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.
It is the first morning of the new century, and the small world of UK competition economics is asleep in Holborn and Oxford. Derek Ridyard has been at NERA for 13 years, running the European competition practice from a Marsh & McLennan office in London. He stayed until April 2002, when he co-founded RBB Economics with Simon Bishop and Simon Baker. John Bridgeman is in his fifth year as Director General of the Office of Fair Trading; John Vickers, currently Chief Economist at the Bank of England, is set to succeed him on 1 October. Derek Morris is in his second year as Chairman of the Competition Commission, having moved across from the chair of its predecessor, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. A few miles away, an eight-month-old firm called Frontier Economics, founded by Z Biro, P J Burns, D M Elliott, S Gaysford and M G Webb, is around 20 consultants strong and in search of a first full year of revenue. Colin Mayer, the Peter Moores Professor at what would become Saïd Business School in 1996 (he joined the predecessor Oxford School of Management Studies in 1994), is formally still attached to Oxera, the small Oxford boutique founded in 1982 to feed off the privatisation programme. Eight months from now, in August 2000, Charles River Associates opened its first London office with around 15 staff, led by three new vice presidents: Christopher Doyle on telecommunications, media and e-business; Robert Laslett on financial services; and Michael Walker on competition policy. Walker, a Lexecon and British Telecom alumnus, had just co-authored The Economics of EU Competition Law with Simon Bishop, the NERA partner who followed Ridyard out the door 18 months later to co-found RBB; the book went through three editions and became a recurring reference for EU competition economics. In the project sources, the visible senior layer is still small.
Compass Lexecon does not exist. Nor does the Competition and Markets Authority. Nor Ofcom. Nor Berkeley Research Group. Nor Keystone Europe. Nor AlixPartners' London economics practice. Nor Charles River Associates' London office. RBB Economics is still 27 months away. Capital Economics is around a year old, renamed at Companies House on 13 January 1999 by a former HSBC chief economist named Roger Bootle, who is at this point its sole director; the business is essentially Bootle himself, deriving income from speeches, articles and presentations to a short list of subscribers, on its way to £265,908 of turnover for the year ending 30 April 2000.
In this series' source set, the visible UK competition-economics market in January 2000 can be reduced to four established names, roughly 200 consultants, and a small group of senior economists whose names recur through the later story. 25 years later, the same source set has grown into a 90-firm project catalogue, with a combined disclosed UK turnover floor north of £2 billion a year, private-equity valuation markers in play, and an RBB Economics LLP whose FY2025 accounts disclose an £5.77 million highest-paid-member line. The gap between those two pictures is the subject of this series. This piece is about who was visible in the room on day one.
National Economic Research Associates was founded in New York in 1961 by Jules Joskow and Irwin Stelzer, two applied microeconomists who thought there was money to be made advising regulated utilities on the rate cases that then clogged the American courts. The London office opened in the 1980s under Stelzer, drawn across the Atlantic by a rarer trove of billable work: the Thatcher privatisation programme, with its gas, telecoms, water and electricity companies each to be valued, unbundled, and set against newly invented regulators. By 2000, NERA London appears in this series as one of the central players in UK regulatory and competition economics, with roughly 80 professional economists and a High Holborn office base. It was one of the default names for this work.
NERA had been owned by Marsh & McLennan Companies since a 1983 acquisition, which parked it alongside Mercer and the rest of the MMC consulting empire. This ownership structure mattered later. When Ridyard, Bishop and Baker walked out in 2002, they were not leaving an independent boutique; they were leaving a subsidiary of a public American insurance broker. That parent-company context helps explain why a partner-owned breakaway could make sense.
The senior London partners in January 2000 were a short list. Derek Ridyard, who had been at NERA since 1987, ran European competition economics; Simon Bishop, a senior competition economist, specialised in merger analysis and market definition; Simon Baker handled coordinated effects and cartel economics. Hovering at the margin was Irwin Stelzer himself, by then writing weekly columns for The Sunday Times and advising Rupert Murdoch, with a loose formal role at NERA London that was more totemic than operational. The three later RBB partners sat three doors down from each other.
Lexecon had been founded in Chicago in 1977 by Judge Richard Posner, William Landes and Andrew Rosenfield, Posner and Landes from the University of Chicago Law School faculty, Rosenfield a former student, with Daniel Fischel and Dennis Carlton joining shortly after founding and becoming public faces of the firm for the next three decades. In 1997 it was acquired by Nextera Enterprises, a holding vehicle that sat somewhere between a consulting firm and an ideological project. In January 2000 the London office was small, a dozen or so consultants, but it carried the intellectual heft of the Chicago School behind it. The core practice was American cartel litigation; the London presence was a bridgehead, not a market leader.
Lexecon was acquired by FTI Consulting in 2003 for roughly $130 million. FTI later acquired COMPASS in 2006, the firm had been founded in 2003 by Robert Willig and Janusz Ordover of Princeton, and merged the two in 2008 to create Compass Lexecon, now one of the major competition-economics brands in Europe. In 2000, that roll-up had not yet happened. Lexecon was a respected US firm with a London annex.
LECG, the Law and Economics Consulting Group, was founded in 1988 in Berkeley, California, by David Teece, a New Zealand-born professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School and a prominent scholar in industrial organisation and corporate strategy. LECG was built on a different model from NERA or Lexecon: a network firm in which senior academics were "experts affiliated with LECG" rather than full-time employees. The economics came from the affiliate network; LECG provided case-management infrastructure, billing plumbing, and a nameplate to hang outside chambers. It was an elegant structure, and for a decade it worked.
By 2000, LECG had a London office but was not yet the force it would become. Its European competition practice was built up through the 2000s, accelerating from 2004 when Jorge Padilla joined as Senior Managing Director from NERA Madrid; by 2009 he was European CEO. LECG went public in 2003 on Nasdaq at $13 a share, peaked at about $25, and then fell steadily through the late 2000s; in 2011 it filed for liquidation. Padilla's team transferred to Compass Lexecon; the rest of the LECG London alumni scattered; David Teece, a year ahead of the collapse, founded Berkeley Research Group and absorbed many of his former colleagues there. In this project chronology, the LECG bankruptcy is one of the important hand-off events in UK economics consulting. It gets a chapter to itself in Part 3.
Oxera was founded in 1982 as "Oxford Economic Research Associates", a spin-out from the University of Oxford's economics department that was, in effect, a sibling operation to the London NERA office: two boutiques set up in parallel to service the Thatcher privatisations. Its early academic leadership was anchored by Colin Mayer, later Saïd Professor of Management at Oxford, who served as chairman of Oxera from 1986 until 2010. A small clarification is worth entering here, Derek Morris, who is often confused with Oxera given the shared Oxford postcode, was in fact chairman of the separate firm Oxford Economic Forecasting Ltd, now Oxford Economics, from 1984 to 1998, before chairing the Monopolies and Mergers Commission from 1998 and taking up the Competition Commission chair when the CC succeeded the MMC in April 1999. By the turn of the century, Mayer had moved on to academia, and Oxera's operating leadership had passed to Luis Correia da Silva and Helen Jenkins, who became joint managing directors after a management buy-out in 2003 and ran the firm for the next 20 years.
Oxera in 2000 was small, perhaps 40 consultants, and its centre of gravity was still Oxford rather than London. Its specialism was regulatory economics for utility regulators: Ofwat, the predecessors of Ofgem, Oftel before Ofcom absorbed it. It was a boutique by choice, and it remained one.
In 2000 there was no CMA — the Competition and Markets Authority was created by the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 and only began operating in April 2014. The competition function of the UK government in 2000 was split between two bodies, and the division is worth tabulating: the next generation of private-sector boutiques drew heavily from the public-sector and regulatory talent pool they kept.
| Body | Head in Jan 2000 | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Office of Fair Trading (OFT) | John Bridgeman | Director General, October 1995–September 2000. Investigated cartels and consumer protection. Referred complex mergers to the Competition Commission. Succeeded by John Vickers on 1 October 2000 (DG to 2003, then Chair 2003–2005 after the OFT became a corporate board). |
| Competition Commission (CC) | Derek Morris | Chairman, April 1999–2004; previously chair of the predecessor Monopolies and Mergers Commission from 1998. Heard references from the OFT, conducted in-depth market investigations, made binding remedies. |
Bridgeman had spent his career running British Alcan Aluminium and arrived at the OFT in 1995 as the Major government's choice. Vickers, then Chief Economist at the Bank of England and a member of its Monetary Policy Committee, would succeed him on 1 October 2000; he had been Professor of Economics at Oxford before the Bank, and would go on to chair the Independent Commission on Banking in 2010 and become Warden of All Souls in 2008. Morris was a fellow Oxford economist; he had chaired the MMC from 1998, became chair of the CC when it succeeded the MMC in April 1999, served until 2004, then returned to academia and later became Provost of Oriel College, Oxford. Both men were the senior generation of UK applied microeconomists, and both moved between the regulator and academia in a way that looks different from the later CMA-era careers in this project's move file. Inside the OFT, the senior economist was Margaret Bloom, the OFT's Director of Competition Enforcement (1997–2003), who from 2002 took up a professorship at King's College London's Centre for European Law and in 2003 joined Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, a move that prefigured the regulator-to-academia pattern still visible in Amelia Fletcher at UEA and Chris Pike at the OECD. The OFT and CC of 2000 together employed perhaps 50 professional economists. That is one visible public-sector pool from which the private-sector economics industry recruited over the next decade.
In 1999 the European Commission blocked the Airtours/First Choice holiday-package merger on the theory that the deal would create "collective dominance", a market structure in which a small number of firms can tacitly coordinate without ever meeting in a smoke-filled room. The decision was an early high-profile application of coordinated-effects economics to a European merger. Airtours appealed, and in 2002 the Court of First Instance annulled the Commission's decision. The judgment became a recurring reference point in European merger-control economics. The economics was done by NERA on the Commission side and by Lexecon on the Airtours side; both firms built London practices around work of this kind.
The European Commission's investigation into Microsoft's bundling of Windows Media Player and its tying of workgroup servers ran from 1998 to 2004, long enough to become a training ground for junior economists. The economics was central to both the liability finding and the remedies; NERA, Lexecon and LECG each had roles. In this series, Microsoft is one of the cases that made European antitrust economics look more like a transatlantic industry than a Brussels legal speciality.
British Airways' loyalty-rebate scheme for travel agents was challenged by Virgin Atlantic under Article 82 (now Article 102 TFEU). The Commission fined BA in 1999; the decision was upheld by the CFI in 2003. The economics of rebate pricing, the question of when a discount stops being a promotion and becomes an abuse of dominance, was central to the case. NERA, LECG and Lexecon built European abuse-of-dominance work around matters of this kind.
These three cases share a pattern worth noting. The three put economic theory near the centre of European competition litigation or enforcement; Airtours also showed that the Commission's economic reasoning could be tested and overturned in court. Together, they help explain the demand environment that the next generation of boutiques would arrive to meet.
In April 2002, Derek Ridyard, Simon Bishop and Simon Baker walked out of NERA London together and took 13 other NERA staff with them, making a founding cohort of 16 economists including Andrea Lofaro. The Global Competition Review headline, preserved in the project archive, remains the most important three-word summary of the UK economics market's history: "Top economics trio leave NERA in the lurch." The three founders named the firm after their initials, Ridyard, Bishop, Baker, and began trading as RBB Economics in April 2002. The current LLP entity, OC315356, was incorporated at Companies House on 26 September 2005; the founding practice itself is three-and-a-half years older than its filed entity. The firm today files from 199 Bishopsgate in the City of London.
What the 2002 spinout established was a visible template for later comparison. A small senior team walks out together rather than one at a time. They take a meaningful junior cohort with them; 13 in RBB's case, bringing the founding cohort to 16, and more than 25 in Econic Partners' case 23 years later. They use a brand that is not tied to one public founder's surname. Several later launches in this series rhyme with that pattern: RBB in 2002, Fingleton Ltd in 2013, Flint in 2015, Pragmatix in 2020, Econic Partners in 2025. Frontier and Vivid are different origin stories, but they belong in the same broader founder-led shift away from the 2000 incumbent map.
Of the 14 named individuals in this piece, where are they in 2026?
| Person | Role in 2000 | Role in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Derek Ridyard | Partner, NERA London | Member, UK Competition Appeal Tribunal (since 2018; ceased consulting at RBB) |
| Simon Bishop | Senior economist, NERA London | Partner, RBB Economics |
| Simon Baker | Economist, NERA London | Partner, RBB Economics |
| John Vickers | Chief Economist, Bank of England (MPC member) | Warden of All Souls College, Oxford (retired) |
| Derek Morris | Chairman, Competition Commission | Provost of Oriel College, Oxford 2004–2013; now Honorary Fellow, St Edmund Hall, Oxford |
| Margaret Bloom | Head of Cartels Branch, OFT | Visiting Professor, King's College London |
| Colin Mayer | Oxera founder, at Saïd Business School | Emeritus Professor, Saïd Business School, Oxford; Member, UK Competition Appeal Tribunal |
| Jorge Padilla | Director / Managing Director, NERA (Madrid, since 1998); Professor of Economics, CEMFI Madrid | Chair, Compass Lexecon International (Madrid) |
| David Teece | Chairman, LECG (held the role 1988–2007, vice-chairman 2007–2009) | Executive Chairman Emeritus, Berkeley Research Group |
| Daniel Fischel | Partner, Lexecon (joined shortly after the 1977 founding by Posner, Landes and Rosenfield) | Chairman and President, Compass Lexecon; Emeritus Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law and Business, University of Chicago Law School |
| Roger Bootle | Sole director, Capital Economics (renamed at CH 13 January 1999, around 12 months old) | Chairman, Capital Economics |
| Luis Correia da Silva | Senior consultant, Oxera (joint MD from 2003 MBO) | Partner, Oxera Consulting LLP (succession to Gunnar Niels) |
| Helen Jenkins | Senior consultant, Oxera (joint MD from 2003 MBO) | Emeritus Partner, Oxera (retired) |
| Irwin Stelzer | NERA London, Sunday Times columnist | Senior Fellow Emeritus, Hudson Institute |
In this cohort table, most are emeritus, retired or in part-time advisory or academic roles, Derek Morris among them, now an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall after a decade as Provost of Oriel College, Oxford; and four are still operationally active in the market: Padilla at Compass Lexecon, Teece at BRG, Bishop and Baker at RBB. Ridyard moved to the Competition Appeal Tribunal in 2018. The founders of the UK competition-economics market are mostly out of the room. The generation replacing them is the CMA-drain cohort from Part 6, Coscelli, Hunt, Calanchi, Sala, Walker, Bon, people who were graduate students or junior case handlers in 2000, and who now inherit the market those founders helped build.
Three differences stand out against today's market. The first is the limited domestic-owned scale. NERA was MMC-owned; Lexecon was Nextera-owned, en route to FTI; LECG was US-headquartered (it would not list on NASDAQ until November 2003); Oxera was independent but small; Frontier was eight months old. The visible large firms in the UK competition-economics market were heavily tied to foreign parents. Today the larger visible firms in this project are a mix of US-parented platforms, FTI/Compass Lexecon, BRG, AlixPartners, A&M, and domestic independents such as RBB and Baringa.
The second absence was private equity. The first private-equity row in this project file is LDC's minority stake in Capital Economics in October 2014, 14 years after our January 2000 snapshot. Before that, the source set is dominated by partnership distributions and foreign corporate ownership. The idea that a specialist economics firm could be worth nine figures to a buyout fund would have sounded unfamiliar in 2000.
The third absence was any single unified regulator. The OFT handled cartels and consumer protection; the Competition Commission handled market investigations and merger remedies; Ofcom did not exist, and telecoms and broadcasting were regulated by Oftel and the Independent Television Commission respectively. Ofwat regulated water; the Office of the Rail Regulator sat in its own silo; and the gas and electricity regulators, Ofgas and OFFER, were already operating jointly before being put on a statutory footing as Ofgem under the Utilities Act 2000. The CMA, which unified the OFT and the CC in 2014, later made the modern career path, CMA economist to private consultancy, much more visible. In 2000 the equivalent path was smaller and less formal: OFT or Competition Commission economist to NERA, LECG, Oxera or another advisory role.
How three NERA economists walked out in 2002 and built RBB Economics into one of the highest profit-per-member firms visible in this project's pure-play economics-boutique sample.
Read Part 2 →