Charles River Associates (legally CRA International, Inc.) is a global consulting firm headquartered in
Boston.
Practice areas
Their practices include: aerospace & defense, antitrust & competition economics,
auctions & competitive bidding, climate & sustainability, energy & environment, enterprise
risk management,
financial accounting & valuation,
financial markets,
financial economics, forensic services, insurance economics,
intellectual property, labor & employment, life sciences,
mergers & acquisitions, and
transfer pricing.
History
CRA acquired economic consultancy firm Lexecon in 2005 to expand its practice into Europe and the United Kingdom.
Marakon, which CRA acquired in 2009, forms part of their
management consulting practice. Marakon Associates was founded in 1978 and pioneered
value-based management (VBM) from the mid 1980s based on the academic work of Dr. Bill Alberts. This management principle, also known as managing for value (MFV), states that management should first and foremost consider the interests of shareholders when making management decisions. Under this principle, senior executives should set performance targets in terms of delivering shareholder returns (stock price and dividends payments) and managing to achieve them.
Economic forecasts used to oppose climate policy
Prior to the
1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the
1997 Kyoto summit (that led to the
Kyoto Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol was an international treaty which extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that commits state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the scientific consensus that (part ...
), the fossil fuel industry used reports authored by CRA and funded by the fossil fuel industry to argue that US compliance with climate policy would be economically disastrous.
CRA called the
Clinton administration
Bill Clinton's tenure as the 42nd president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 1993, and ended on January 20, 2001. Clinton, a Democrat from Arkansas, took office following a decisive election victory over Re ...
's projections for costs of compliance with the Kyoto Protocol wildly optimistic, and argued that compliance would take a "healthy whack out of the economy". CRA's work forecasting the impact on employment of the 2003
Climate Stewardship Act was criticized by the
Natural Resources Defense Council in 2005 for using unrealistic economic assumptions and producing directionally incorrect estimates. According to a 2021 study, flawed economic forecasting reports written by four economists at Charles River Associates between 1991 and 2009, and paid for by fossil fuel interests, overestimated predicted costs and ignored potential policy benefits. The study argues that the reports written by CRA "played a key role in weakening, delaying, or defeating a wide range of climate policies".
See also
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Analysis Group
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Bates White
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Berkeley Research Group
Berkeley Research Group, LLC (BRG) is a global consulting firm that helps organizations with assistance in disputes and investigations, corporate finance, as well as strategy and operations. BRG is headquartered in Emeryville, California, with of ...
*
Brattle Group
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Compass Lexecon
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Cornerstone Research
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Frontier Economics
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NERA Economic Consulting
References
Further reading
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External links
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CRA International at OpenCorporates
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Macroeconomics consulting firms
International management consulting firms
Management consulting firms of Canada
Management consulting firms of the United States
Companies based in Massachusetts
Companies listed on the Nasdaq