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

The Invasion

From the early 2000s to the mid-2010s, the project chronology shows an uneven US presence in London. Lexecon, Brattle, CRA and Compass Lexecon were already part of the market; Cornerstone Research and Analysis Group then added new London entities in 2014 and 2017. European merger work, CAT work and UK regulatory economics were still heavily associated in this series with the London-rooted practices around RBB, Frontier, Oxera and Compass Lexecon. By the end of the decade, the market looked less domestic than it had in 2010.

In 2014 Cornerstone Research opened a London office, and the project register records Cornerstone Research UK as incorporated on 13 August 2014. The firm source notes describe a US business founded in 1989, so the UK opening came about 25 years after the original firm. Cartel damages work, Brussels follow-on claims and English High Court litigation gave the US expert-witness model a clearer European route.

Analysis Group followed three years later. The firm had been 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. On that basis, the London entity appears about 36 years after the original US founding. The office began with a small team and a mandate to build a European litigation-economics bench.

Meanwhile the LECG collapse left two different traces in the project file. Compass Lexecon acquired the named European competition practice in 2011, while BRG UK appears as a 2010 UK entity linked to David Teece and the wider post-LECG story. By 2018 the global BRG group was billing into nine figures in dollar revenue, though Berkeley Research Group (UK) Limited (07245710) reported more modest UK turnover in its filed accounts. It was also losing money on the UK entity, a detail worth keeping in mind.

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

Of the US transplants on that list, Charles River Associates is the one whose London arrival reaches furthest back in the project chronology, and it repays a closer look. CRA was founded in 1965 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Jerry Kraft, John Kaler and Alan Willens; it went public on 23 April 1998 and is listed on NASDAQ under the ticker CRAI. Its Companies House UK entity, CRA International (UK), company number 04007726, was incorporated on 5 June 2000. That places CRA among the older American litigation-and-regulatory-economics houses, alongside NERA (New York, 1961) and Lexecon Inc. (Chicago, 1977), and ahead of the wave of firms, Analysis Group (1981), Cornerstone (1989), Brattle (1990), that would all eventually chase the same London market.

CRA announced its London office in August 2000, positioning the launch as "a pivotal step in CRA's efforts to expand its geographic footprint". It was the firm's first office outside North America. The launch was framed around three practice areas, with three economists appointed as Vice Presidents to lead them: Christopher Doyle (Telecommunications, Media & e-Business), Robert Laslett (Financial Services) and Michael Walker (Competition), the office opening with around fifteen staff. The single most consequential hire was Walker, who came to CRA from a senior regulatory-economist role at British Telecom and a partnership at a London-and-Brussels consultancy, and who had co-authored The Economics of EU Competition Law with Simon Bishop. The neat irony of the early-2000s London market was that the two co-authors of the leading competition-law textbook ended up at rival firms: Bishop co-founded RBB in 2002, while Walker had moved in August 2000 to open CRA's London office, handing CRA instant credibility in European competition cases. He served as Vice-President of CRA's European Competition Team in London from August 2000 to September 2013.

CRA's London presence grew sharply in May 2005, when it acquired Lexecon Ltd, Bill Bishop's firm (no relation to RBB's Simon Bishop), to expand its competition practice across Europe and the UK. The deal resolves the long-standing Lexecon naming confusion: Lexecon Ltd of London, formally established in London in 1991 by Bill Bishop, was always a separate legal entity from Lexecon Inc. of Chicago, despite a shared brand and an early affiliation. CRA's own 17 May 2005 announcement put it beyond doubt, describing Lexecon Ltd as founded in 1991 with offices in London, Brussels and Munich, and stating plainly that the firm “is not affiliated with Lexecon, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of FTI Consulting”. The practice it brought across had run a string of landmark European cases, among them Airtours, GE/Honeywell, Tetra/Sidel, Microsoft and Oracle/PeopleSoft. From 2005 the European Lexecon brand effectively vanished into CRA, while the US Lexecon Inc., by then owned by FTI Consulting, remained separate and went on to form Compass Lexecon. The acquisition gave CRA London a ready-made European competition bench rather than one assembled hire by hire.

From a standing start in 2000, the UK entity grew into one of the larger firms in the market: Companies House financials in the project database show CRA International (UK) turnover rising from roughly £7.5m in FY2002 to £87.9m in FY2023, settling at £82.4m for the year-end 28 December 2024 at roughly a 10.1 per cent operating margin. Two senior figures who passed through CRA London illustrate its standing: Cristina Caffarra, who came to CRA in 2005 through the Lexecon Ltd acquisition, having been a partner at Lexecon, and went on to run its European competition practice as a Senior Vice President until leaving in 2022 to build Keystone's European arm; and Andrea Coscelli, recorded as a Vice President in CRA's London office before he became Chief Executive of the CMA. Later hires included Philip Kalmus, who joined as a vice president in 2014 from Compass Lexecon, and Kai-Uwe Kuhn, the former Chief Economist of DG Competition (2011–13), who re-affiliated with CRA as a senior consultant in 2013. By the end of the 2010s CRA sat in the top tier of the UK market alongside RBB Economics, Compass Lexecon and NERA, its London office a significant European hub within a competition practice fielding 150-plus competition economists globally. Group-wide, the listed parent (NASDAQ: CRAI) reported revenue of US$751.6m and roughly 959 consultants in its 2025 financial year, and CRA was named an “Elite” economics firm in the 2024 Global Competition Review 100.

The traffic ran both ways. Frontier Economics added Dublin, Madrid, Berlin and Brussels offices across the decade; Oxera grew its Brussels and Amsterdam benches; RBB Economics opened Johannesburg, Melbourne, Stockholm and The Hague. By the end of 2020, the major competition-economics firms visible in this project were no longer cleanly domestic stories. London had become a shared node in a transatlantic and European talent pool.

The Phoenix Deal

On 27 March 2018, Phoenix Equity Partners announced a controlling stake in Capital Economics. Phoenix said the investment valued the business at circa £95 million; LDC said Capital Economics had grown revenue to more than £22.5 million in its latest financial year. The implied multiple, therefore, was roughly 4.2 times revenue, a high figure for a research subscription shop but one that sits alongside LDC's recurring income and modest capex growth narrative rather than current-year turnover alone. For the UK economics sector it was a watershed: in this project file, no founder-owned economics-research house had yet disclosed a comparable control valuation.

LDC had held a minority stake since 2014 and now exited. Roger Bootle remained involved as chairman, while the project career file records Neil Shearing as Group Chief Economist from 2018. The deal did two things that matter for this dataset. It put private equity into the control position of a UK economics-research firm at scale. And the later filings show debt structures that look different from the founder-owned era.

The leverage piece is visible in Companies House. From 2018 onwards the Capital Economics filings show charges registered to Nordic Trustee, the Oslo-based bond agent used for Nordic high-yield issuance. That is not a structure visible in the founder-owned period of the file; it is consistent with a sponsor-backed subscription business carrying bond debt rather than simple bank lending. The trail of Nordic Trustee charges across the Capital Economics group entities is a fingerprint of the Phoenix ownership period, the kind of detail that does not appear in a press release but sits on the public register for anyone who knows where to look.

It mattered for what came next. A PE-owned Capital Economics now had a sponsor timetable around it. The filings after 2018 show the business operating under a different capital structure, while Phoenix's own release points to investment in services, technology and acquisitions. The sourced claim here is narrower than a full management history: the public record shows a new control owner, a continuing founder-chairman, a named group chief economist, and a different debt structure.

The Brexit Effect

The referendum closed on 23 June 2016. By the morning of 24 June, the uncertainty that would feed policy, regulatory and economics advisory work was visible. Much of merger control, state aid, competition enforcement, financial-services passporting, tariffs, environmental standards and procurement had to be remapped through a political process that was still being invented. The firms that could turn uncertainty into usable client advice had an opening.

Four political and economic advisory shops in this source set were founded between 2014 and 2016: Stonehaven, Flint, Public First and Hanbury. They were not traditional economics consultancies. Their public materials and officer histories point to senior government, campaign and policy experience alongside research or economic-policy work; their revenue is not always separately disclosed in a form that permits like-for-like verification.

The dates tell a narrower but still useful story. Stonehaven appears in the project file in 2014; Flint in 2015; Public First and Hanbury in 2016. The named founders in the project people file include Downing Street, Foreign Office, regulator and campaign backgrounds. That is enough to call it a visible labour-market reshuffle around the end of the Cameron era, without pretending the four firms were identical.

Flint is the cleanest example of the revolving door in action. Companies House filings show that Ed Richards (Ofcom CEO 2006–14, previously senior policy adviser to Tony Blair) and Sir Simon Fraser (Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office 2010–15) co-founded Flint Global Ltd in September 2015, within months of each leaving their government posts. In November 2024, James Purnell, former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (2008–09) and later BBC Director of Strategy, joined as a director. The result is three former holders of senior public posts on the board of a single advisory firm. The Cameron era threw off a decade of senior public-sector operators who now had to earn a living in the private market; Brexit handed them the clients to do it.

The traditional economics firms felt the referendum differently. The Competition and Markets Authority took on workload the European Commission used to absorb. Merger cases that would have gone to Brussels stayed in London. State aid work reinvented itself as subsidy control. The CMA began building a bigger panel of external economists, a bigger case team, and a bigger appetite for market studies, and RBB, Frontier, Oxera, CRA, and Compass Lexecon each show hiring into the expanded CMA practice in this project's source file. The UK competition economics market, which had looked uncomfortably dependent on EU referrals, suddenly found itself with a domestic regulator that needed significantly more external help than it had before. The referendum, intended to shrink Britain’s regulatory surface area, had enlarged it.

RBB’s Breakout

RBB Economics had spent the 2000s and early 2010s doing one thing very well. The firm, built out of NERA’s London office in April 2002 by Simon Bishop, Derek Ridyard, and Simon Baker, in the manner Part 2 narrates at length, focused on competition economics and kept a relatively small LLP member base. By 2015 the pattern was more than a decade old and looked like a plateau. Then the numbers broke.

Between FY2021 and FY2022 RBB’s revenue crossed £60 million on a member count that stayed around 20. Operating margin held north of 60 per cent on the post-FY2021 accounting-policy basis; the partner count did not change materially. The filed-account evidence does not prove why the economics improved, so the safer reading is that the same narrow competition-economics model was now producing much more revenue per member. Simon Bishop remains a designated member of the LLP, appointed 26 September 2005 per Companies House.

The comparison is instructive even without reaching outside the filed accounts. RBB was generating more than £2 million of profit per member in the FY2021-FY2022 window, in a market where many specialist economics firms either disclosed lower member economics or did not disclose comparable figures at all. Law-firm or Big Four partner-pay comparisons can be tempting, but those comparisons are never clean. The important fact is that a small competition-economics LLP was producing unusually concentrated economics on its own filings.

There was no trade press coverage of RBB’s margins in the source set reviewed for this project. The firm did not publish league tables; it filed its LLP accounts at Companies House with the statutory minimum of disclosure. The profit numbers are visible in those filings if you know where to look, but this project has not found a public analyst or journalist who had extracted them before this series.

The Emerging Ecosystem

Beneath the established firms a new layer arrived. In the project file, several launches or scale-up stories sit in the 2014–2016 window, and the founder backgrounds do not look like a simple RBB-Frontier-Oxera-Compass alumni pipeline. The named rows include Treasury, Which?, Downing Street, HSBC macro research and structured-products desks at banks. The pedigree had shifted, and with it the shape of the work.

Fideres deserves a separate line. Alberto Thomas had appeared as a Treasury Select Committee witness on benchmark manipulation in July 2014, a rare external-economist slot in the LIBOR aftermath, and the firm took that positioning and built on it. By the late 2010s Fideres was billing into follow-on damages cases across Europe and the US, with a litigation-funder client base that sat outside the classic merger-control workflow. Fideres operated as a financial-economics litigation engine rather than a competition boutique, and it occupied a segment, litigation-funded damages claims, where the established firms had been less visible. That was the trick. Build the franchise where the incumbents were not already planted.

Quiet Scaling: Frontier and Oxera

Frontier Economics entered the decade as an employee-owned partnership; it exited the decade the same way. No PE money, no bond debt, no holding company restructure, no US acquirer. Between FY2015 and FY2020 the filed turnover line rose each year from £29.8 million to £56.4 million, and the FY2021 snapshot used in this article reaches about £61.4 million. The firm also opened Madrid and Berlin offices during the period. The partner count grew, the profit share stayed within the partnership, and the firm kept doing the same mix of regulation, competition and policy work it had done since Simon Gaysford, Philip Burns, Dan Elliott, Zoltan Biro and Michael Webb founded it out of London Economics and the Bank of England in 1999, with the equity given away on day one.

Oxera took a parallel path. In 2014 the firm converted to LLP structure and the project people file records Gunnar Niels as managing partner from May 2014. Through the second half of the decade Oxera is one of the clearer filed-account growth stories in the UK sector. Its Dutch and Belgian offices kept it in the European market; its Oxford and London offices gave it UK regulatory capacity; its financial services practice sat close to post-Brexit regulatory reconfiguration. Revenue rose from £17.9 million in FY2015 to £34.2 million in FY2020 and £35.9 million in FY2021.

Neither firm had a dramatic year in the way Capital Economics or Vivid did. Neither took outside capital in this project file. Both show filed-account growth through the Brexit period while other firms restructured, sold, or chased the PE money. Between them, they are two of the cleaner steady-growth stories this project can verify from filed accounts and firm-history rows.

The Vivid Economics Story Begins

Vivid Economics was founded in 2006 by Robin Smale and Professor Cameron Hepburn. Hepburn held an Oxford economics chair; Smale came out of the climate and energy policy side of government; and the founding thesis was straightforward enough, the gap between the traditional economic consultancies and the management consultancies wanted a climate specialist to fill it. For a decade Vivid was a small player, respected in climate circles, with limited visibility outside them.

Between 2015 and 2020 that changed. The firm grew from a small specialist into a visible London-Amsterdam-US climate-economics platform; its client base expanded from UK and EU government departments to development finance institutions, multilaterals, central banks, and a growing roster of corporate clients that now treated climate risk as a board-level question rather than a sustainability-report line item. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, the Paris Agreement follow-through, and the arrival of climate scenario stress testing helped push work onto Vivid’s bench.

McKinsey noticed. The hard sourced points are these: on 4 March 2021 McKinsey announced the acquisition of Vivid Economics and Planetrics, the climate analytics software suite, and six weeks later, on 20 April 2021, launched McKinsey Sustainability as a dedicated client-service platform with the Vivid bench at its core. The press release framed it as a strategic addition. In this series, it also reads as a capability purchase: McKinsey bought a specialist climate-economics bench and analytics suite in one transaction rather than building every part internally.

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 UK economics consulting sector looked more legible in this project file. The US-linked firms were operational in London; PE money had found a visible economics-research target; Brexit had enlarged parts of the domestic regulatory demand base; a new layer of political-economic advisory firms had scaled; and the traditional competition boutiques were posting margins that made the sector harder to ignore. The 2020/FY2021 snapshot below is not a complete market valuation; it is a filed-account and source-note view of the firms this project can track.