[1] His father, Andrew O'Rourke, was a senior Irish diplomat who had served as ambassador to the UK and France among others.
[5] 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,[6] rather that it was driven by a (sudden, Famine-induced) change in the structure of the agricultural industry, in particular the use of potato as an input,[7] as well as greater opportunities for Irish labourers abroad, in particular in the US, due to the again-sudden existence of emigrant networks and information flows back to Ireland.
[3] 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.
[5][11] 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.
[18] In 2019, he left Oxford and moved to the United Arab Emirates where he joined New York University Abu Dhabi as Professor of Economics.