Charles River Associates (legally CRA International, Inc.) is a global consulting firm headquartered in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

Practice areas

Their practices include: aerospace & defense, antitrust & competition economics,

auctions An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition ex ...

& competitive bidding, climate & sustainability, energy & environment, enterprise risk management,

financial accounting Financial accounting is the field of accounting concerned with the summary, analysis and reporting of financial transactions related to a business. This involves the preparation of financial statements available for public use. Stockholders, s ...

& valuation,

financial markets A financial market is a market in which people trade financial securities and derivatives at low transaction costs. Some of the securities include stocks and bonds, raw materials and precious metals, which are known in the financial markets ...

financial economics Financial economics, also known as finance, is the branch of economics characterized by a "concentration on monetary activities", in which "money of one type or another is likely to appear on ''both sides'' of a trade".William F. Sharpe"Financial ...

, forensic services, insurance economics,

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

, labor & employment, life sciences,

mergers & acquisitions Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspect ...

, and

transfer pricing In taxation and accounting, transfer pricing refers to the rules and methods for pricing transactions within and between enterprises under common ownership or control. Because of the potential for cross-border controlled transactions to distort ...

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 Management consulting is the practice of providing consulting services to organizations to improve their performance or in any way to assist in achieving organizational objectives. Organizations may draw upon the services of management consultant ...

practice. Marakon Associates was founded in 1978 and pioneered

value-based management Shareholder value is a business term, sometimes phrased as shareholder value maximization. It became prominent during the 1980s and 1990s along with the management principle value-based management or "managing for value". Definition The term "shar ...

(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 The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio Conference or the Earth Summit (Portuguese: ECO92), was a major United Nations conference held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to June 14, 1992. Earth S ...

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 The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a United States-based 501(c)(3) non-profit international environmental advocacy group, with its headquarters in New York City and offices in Washington D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Bo ...

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".

References

External links

*
CRA International at

OpenCorporates OpenCorporates is a website that shares data on corporations under the copyleft Open Database License. The company was launched on 20 December 2010, by Chris Taggart and Rob McKinnon. Recognition In 2011, the site won third place in the O ...

{{Authority control, state=expanded 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

Practice areas

History

Economic forecasts used to oppose climate policy

See also

References

Further reading

External links