Kevin O’Rourke is the Chichele Professor of Economic History at All Souls College, Oxford and the Director of CEPR‚Äôs Economic History programme. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1989, and taught at Columbia, Harvard, University College Dublin, and Sciences Po Paris and Trinity College Dublin. He is currently Vice President of the Economic History Association, and has served as an editor of the European Review of Economic History, as an editorial board member of the Journal of Economic History and World Politics, as a Trustee of the Cliometric Society, and as President of the European Historical Economics Society. He has written extensively on the history of globalization, and his Globalization and History (co-authored with Jeffrey G. Williamson) won the 1999 American Association of Publishers/PSP Award for the best scholarly book in economics.

Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium, co-authored with Ronald Findlay, was published by Princeton University Press in 2007. In his spare time, Kevin serves as a municipal counsellor in St Pierre d’Entremont, a small mountain village in France.

By this expert

Why Economics Needs Economic History

Article | Sep 27, 2013

The current economic and financial crisis has given rise to a vigorous debate about the state of economics, and the training which graduate and undergraduates economics students are receiving. Importantly, among those arguing most strongly for a change in the way that young economists are trained are the ultimate employers of these students, in both the private and the public sector. Employers are increasingly complaining that young economists don’t understand how the financial system actually works, and are ill-prepared to think about appropriate policies at a time of crisis.

A Tale of Two Trilemmas

Paper Conference paper | | Apr 2011

In a classic book and subsequent articles, Obstfeld and Taylor (2004) have shown how the broad contours of international financial history over the past century and a half can be well understood by appealing to the famous economictrilemma which emerges from the standard Mundell-Fleming model many of us still teach our undergraduates.