The Global Arms Race: 2015-2020

Part 4 of 7: US and European firms deepen their London benches; private equity takes control of Capital Economics; Brexit expands regulatory-advisory demand; and RBB's filed accounts start to stand out.

Leath · 10 April 2026 · 16 min read

London Goes Global

From the early 2000s to the mid-2010s, London’s economics market went global in stages. Lexecon, Brattle, CRA and Compass Lexecon arrived first. Cornerstone Research and Analysis Group added UK entities in 2014 and 2017. The London-rooted practices at RBB, Frontier, Oxera and Compass Lexecon still dominated much of the European merger, CAT and UK regulatory work in this series. But by the decade’s end, the market was markedly less domestic than it had been in 2010.

Cornerstone Research opened a London office in 2014. The project register records Cornerstone Research UK as incorporated on 13 August 2014. The source notes date the US business to 1989, putting its UK arrival about 25 years later. Cartel damages, Brussels follow-on claims and English High Court litigation gave the American expert-witness model a clearer route into Europe.

Analysis Group followed three years later. The firm was founded in Boston in 1981 by Bruce Stangle and Michael F Koehn; the project register records Analysis Group Ltd as incorporated in the UK on 20 February 2017. The London entity therefore arrived about 36 years after the American firm. A small opening team was charged with building a European litigation-economics bench.

The collapse of LECG left two traces in the project file. Compass Lexecon acquired its named European competition practice in 2011. BRG UK appears as a 2010 entity linked to David Teece and the wider post-LECG story. By 2018 the global BRG group was billing nine figures in dollar revenue, but Berkeley Research Group (UK) Limited (07245710) reported far less turnover in Britain. The UK entity was also losing money.

Charles River Associates: the American house that planted a flag in London

Charles River Associates is the earliest of these American transplants in the project chronology. Jerry Kraft, John Kaler and Alan Willens founded CRA in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1965. It went public on 23 April 1998 and trades on NASDAQ as CRAI. Its Companies House entity, CRA International (UK), company number 04007726, was incorporated on 5 June 2000. For comparison, the chronology dates NERA to 1961, Lexecon Inc. to 1977, Analysis Group to 1981, Cornerstone to 1989 and Brattle to 1990.

CRA announced its London office in August 2000, calling it "a pivotal step in CRA's efforts to expand its geographic footprint" and international presence. Three vice-presidents led three practices: Christopher Doyle in Telecommunications, Media & e-Business; Robert Laslett in Financial Services; and Michael Walker in Competition. The office opened with about fifteen staff.

Walker joined from London Economics. Before that he had worked as a senior regulatory economist at British Telecom and at the London-and-Brussels Lexecon Ltd. He also co-authored The Economics of E.C. Competition Law with Simon Bishop. The two later became rivals: Bishop co-founded RBB in 2002, whereas Walker moved in August 2000 to open CRA’s London office. Walker served as vice-president of CRA’s European Competition Team in London from August 2000 to September 2013.

CRA expanded in May 2005 by acquiring Lexecon Ltd, Bill Bishop’s firm (no relation to RBB’s Simon Bishop). The deal also settles an old naming confusion. Bill Bishop formally established London’s Lexecon Ltd in 1991. It remained legally separate from Chicago’s Lexecon Inc., despite a shared brand and an early affiliation. CRA’s announcement of 17 May 2005 described the London firm as founded in 1991, with offices in London, Brussels and Munich. It also stated that the firm “is not affiliated with Lexecon, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of FTI Consulting”.

The acquired practice had worked on Airtours, GE/Honeywell, Tetra/Sidel, Microsoft and Oracle/PeopleSoft. From 2005 the European Lexecon brand disappeared into CRA. The American Lexecon Inc., then owned by FTI Consulting, remained separate and later helped form Compass Lexecon. CRA bought a ready-made European competition bench instead of assembling one economist at a time.

From a standing start in 2000, CRA became one of the market’s larger firms. Companies House data in the project database show CRA International (UK) turnover rising from roughly £7.5m in FY2002 to £87.9m in FY2023. For the year ending 28 December 2024 it reported £82.4m at an operating margin of roughly 10.1 per cent.

The senior traffic through CRA London shows its standing. Cristina Caffarra arrived in the 2005 Lexecon Ltd acquisition and led CRA’s European competition practice as a senior vice-president until 2022, when she left to build Keystone’s European arm. Andrea Coscelli was a vice-president in the London office before becoming chief executive of the CMA. Philip Kalmus joined from Compass Lexecon as a vice-president in 2014. Kai-Uwe Kuhn, chief economist of DG Competition in 2011–13, re-affiliated with CRA as a senior consultant in 2013.

By the end of the 2010s CRA sat in the UK’s top tier alongside RBB Economics, Compass Lexecon and NERA. London was a substantial European hub within a global competition practice of more than 150 economists. The listed parent (NASDAQ: CRAI) reported revenue of roughly US$687 million in its 2024 financial year.

The traffic ran both ways. Frontier Economics added offices in Dublin, Madrid, Berlin and Brussels. Oxera expanded in Brussels and Amsterdam. RBB Economics opened in Johannesburg, Melbourne, Stockholm and The Hague. By the end of 2020, none of the major competition firms visible in this project was a neat domestic story. London had become a junction in a transatlantic and European talent market.

The Phoenix Deal

In March 2018, Phoenix Equity Partners announced a controlling stake in Capital Economics. Phoenix put the valuation at about £95 million. LDC said Capital Economics had grown revenue to more than £22.5 million in its latest financial year. That implies roughly 4.2 times revenue. The figure is rich for a research-subscription business, though LDC stressed recurring income, light capital needs and growth rather than current turnover alone. No founder-owned economics-research house in this project file had disclosed a comparable control valuation.

LDC, a minority investor since 2014, now exited. Roger Bootle stayed as chairman; the project career file records Neil Shearing as group chief economist from 2018. The deal put private equity in control of a sizeable UK economics-research firm. Later filings also reveal a debt structure unlike that of the founder-owned era.

Companies House reveals the debt. During Phoenix’s ownership, Capital Economics registered charges to Ocorian Trustee (UK) Limited, trading as Nordic Trustee, a bond agent used for Nordic high-yield issuance. Nothing similar appears in the founder-owned period of the file. The structure is consistent with a sponsor-backed subscription business carrying bond debt rather than a simple bank loan. The charges across the group amount to a public-register fingerprint of Phoenix’s ownership—useful precisely because no press release dwells on them.

Ownership changed the clock as well as the balance sheet. Capital Economics now had a sponsor’s timetable. Filings after 2018 show the new capital structure; Phoenix’s release points to investment in services, technology and acquisitions. The public record supports a narrow conclusion: a new controlling owner, the founder still in the chair, a named group chief economist and different debt.

The Brexit Effect

The referendum closed on 23 June 2016. By the morning of 24 June, uncertainty had become a market. Merger control, state aid, competition enforcement, financial-services passporting, tariffs, environmental standards and procurement all had to be remapped while the political process itself was still being invented. Firms able to turn confusion into usable advice had an opening.

Four political and economic advisory firms in this source set were founded between 2014 and 2016: Stonehaven, Flint, Public First and Hanbury. None was a traditional economics consultancy. Their public materials and officer histories combine senior government, campaign and policy experience with research or economic-policy work. Their revenue is not always disclosed in a form that permits clean comparison.

The dates tell a narrower story. Stonehaven appears in the project file in 2014, Flint in 2015, and Public First and Hanbury in 2016. Their named founders came from Downing Street, the Foreign Office, regulators and campaigns. The four firms were not identical. Together, however, they show a labour-market reshuffle at the end of the Cameron era.

Flint offers the clearest revolving door. Companies House filings show Ed Richards and Sir Simon Fraser co-founding Flint Global Ltd in September 2015. Richards had led Ofcom in 2006–14 and advised Tony Blair. Fraser was permanent secretary at the Foreign Office in 2010–15. Both had left government only months earlier.

James Purnell joined the board in November 2024. He had been secretary of state for work and pensions in 2008–09 and later the BBC’s director of strategy. One advisory firm thus had three former holders of senior public posts on its board. The Cameron era supplied the operators; Brexit supplied the clients.

Traditional economics firms felt the referendum differently. The Competition and Markets Authority absorbed work once handled by the European Commission. Merger cases stayed in London instead of going to Brussels. State aid became subsidy control. The CMA expanded its external panel, case team and appetite for market studies. RBB, Frontier, Oxera, CRA and Compass Lexecon all show hiring into this expanded practice in the project’s source file.

A market that had depended uncomfortably on EU referrals now had a domestic regulator in need of far more outside help. The referendum was meant to reduce Britain’s regulatory surface. It enlarged it.

RBB’s Breakout

RBB Economics spent the 2000s and early 2010s doing one thing very well. Simon Bishop, Derek Ridyard and Simon Baker built it from NERA’s London office in April 2002, as Part 2 describes. The firm stuck to competition economics and kept its LLP member base small. By 2015 that decade-old pattern looked like a plateau. Then the numbers broke upwards.

RBB’s revenue crossed £60 million in FY2021 while its member count remained around 20. On the post-FY2021 accounting-policy basis, operating margin stayed above 60 per cent. Partner numbers barely moved. The accounts do not explain the improvement. They do show the same narrow competition-economics model producing much more revenue per member. Companies House still records Simon Bishop as a designated member, appointed on 26 September 2005.

The filed accounts make the comparison stark enough. RBB generated more than £2 million of profit per member in the FY2021-FY2022 window. Many specialist rivals disclosed either lower member economics or no comparable figure. Comparisons with law firms or the Big Four are tempting but messy. The clean point is narrower: a small competition-economics LLP was producing unusually concentrated profits.

The source set contains no trade-press coverage of RBB’s margins. The firm published no league table and filed only the statutory minimum at Companies House. The profits are there, but this project found no analyst or journalist who had extracted them before this series.

The Emerging Ecosystem

A new layer formed beneath the established firms in 2014–2016. Its founders did not come through a simple RBB-Frontier-Oxera-Compass pipeline. The named rows include the Treasury, Which?, Downing Street, HSBC macro research and banks’ structured-products desks. Different pedigrees brought different work.

Fideres deserves separate treatment. In July 2014 Alberto Thomas appeared before the Treasury Select Committee on benchmark manipulation, a rare external-economist role in the aftermath of LIBOR. The firm built on that position. By the late 2010s it was working on follow-on damages cases across Europe and the US, often for litigation funders outside the classic merger-control circuit.

Fideres became a financial-economics litigation engine rather than another competition boutique. It chose litigation-funded damages claims, a segment where established firms had been less visible. The trick was simple: plant the franchise where the incumbents were not.

Quiet Scaling: Frontier and Oxera

Frontier Economics entered the decade as an employee-owned partnership and left it the same way. There was no private equity, bond debt, holding-company restructure or American acquirer. Filed turnover rose each year, from £29.8 million in FY2015 to £53.1 million in FY2019. It kept climbing through the pandemic, reaching about £61.4 million in the FY2021 snapshot used here. Frontier also opened offices in Madrid and Berlin.

Partner numbers grew and profits stayed within the partnership. The mix of regulatory, competition and policy work remained recognisable. Simon Gaysford, Dan Elliott and Philip Burns had founded the firm from London Economics and the Bank of England in 1999. Zoltan Biro and Michael Webb completed the founding group within months, with equity distributed from day one.

Oxera followed a parallel course. It converted to an LLP in 2014; the project people file records Gunnar Niels as managing partner from May 2014. Its Dutch and Belgian offices kept it in the European market. Oxford and London supplied UK regulatory capacity, while financial services put it close to the post-Brexit remapping. Revenue rose from £17.9 million in FY2015 to £34.2 million in FY2020 and £35.9 million in FY2021.

Neither firm produced a dramatic transaction like Capital Economics or Vivid. Neither took outside capital in the project file. Both simply grew through the Brexit period while others restructured, sold or courted private equity. The filed accounts and firm histories make them the cleanest steady-growth stories in the set.

The Vivid Economics Story Begins

Robin Smale and Professor Cameron Hepburn founded Vivid Economics in 2006. Hepburn held an Oxford economics chair; Smale had built his career in climate and energy policy. Their bet was that the gap between economic and management consultancies needed a climate specialist. For a decade Vivid remained small, respected in climate circles and little noticed outside them.

Between 2015 and 2020 that changed. Vivid grew into a visible London-Amsterdam-US climate-economics platform. Its clients expanded beyond UK and EU departments to development-finance institutions, multilaterals, central banks and companies treating climate risk as a board question rather than a line in a sustainability report. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, the Paris Agreement follow-through and climate stress tests all pushed work towards Vivid.

McKinsey noticed. On 4 March 2021 it announced the acquisition of Vivid Economics and Planetrics, its climate-analytics software suite. Six weeks later, on 20 April 2021, McKinsey launched McKinsey Sustainability, with Vivid as a central part of the new client-service platform. The release called the deal a strategic addition. More plainly, McKinsey bought a specialist economics bench and its analytics in one transaction rather than building both from scratch.

Cameron Hepburn retained his Oxford chair and later appears in the project people file as a McKinsey Sustainability senior adviser. The integration into McKinsey began with the March 2021 acquisition announcement. We will return to it in Part 5, because the UK corporate shell later entered members' voluntary liquidation.

The End of 2020 Snapshot

By the close of 2020 the sector was easier to read. American firms had established London operations. Private equity had found an economics-research target. Brexit had expanded parts of domestic regulatory demand. Political-economic advisers had scaled. Competition boutiques were posting margins too large to ignore. The 2020/FY2021 snapshot below is not a market valuation; it covers only the firms this project can track through filed accounts and source notes.