O'Rourke was born on 25 March 1963 in Bern, Switzerland. His father, Andrew O'Rourke, was a senior Irish diplomat who had served as ambassador to the UK and France among others. From 1980 to 1984, he studied economics and maths at Trinity College Dublin, and was elected a Scholar of the College in 1982. He graduated in 1984 with a first class honoursBachelor of Arts degree; as per tradition, his BA was later promoted to a Master of Arts degree. From 1984 to 1989, he attended Harvard University, where he undertook postgraduate studies in economics. He was awarded a Master of Arts degree in June 1986 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in June 1989. His dissertation was titled "Agricultural Change and Rural Depopulation: Ireland 1845–76". Using computable general equilibrium techniques, and detailed statistics on the Irish economy collected by the UK administration, he challenged the hypothesis that Ireland's Great Famine was merely an inevitable acceleration of existing trends. His work showed that rural depopulation was not linked to relative price changes for agricultural goods, rather that it was driven by a change in the structure of the agricultural industry, in particular the use of potato as an input, as well as greater opportunities for Irish labourers abroad, in particular in the USA, due to the again-sudden existence of emigrant networks and information flows back to Ireland.
Academic career
From 1989 to 1992, O'Rourke was an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. In 1992, he moved to University College, Dublin as a college lecturer in its Department of Economics. He was promoted to statutory lecturer in 1997. For the spring of 1999, he was a visitingassociate professor in the Department of Economics, Harvard University. During this time, O'Rourke established himself as one of the leading scholars on nineteenth-century globalization, together with Jeffrey Williamson, his former PhD advisor. Their book 'Globalization and History' won the Economics category of the APA 1999 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition. In 2000, he moved to Trinity College, Dublin where he was appointed Professor of Economics. In Spring 2005, he was a visiting professor to Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. During his time at Trinity, he expanded his research on international trade, culminating in 'Power & Plenty', a history of the world economy in the second millennium. Later in the decade, as the Great Recession struck, O'Rourke became interested in the parallels between it and the Great Depression. Posts at popular economics blog VoxEU by O'Rourke and Barry Eichengreen on the topic remain the most popular articles ever published on the site. From 2009 to 2011, O'Rourke was the President of the European Historical Economics Society, a learned society of European economic historians. He has also served as editor of the organization's publication, the European Review of Economic History. He has also served as editor for other peer-reviewedacademic journals, including the Journal of Economic History, World Politics, and Oxford Economic Papers. In 2011, O'Rourke joined the University of Oxford as Chichele Professor of Economic History. With this appointment, he was also elected a University Academic Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In January 2014, he additionally became research director of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a European charity.
