Professor Kevin O’Rourke, from Sciences Po Paris and CNRS, has been announced as the recipient of the prestigious Alice Murray Distinguished Scholar Award. This award, presented by the Centre for Economics, Policy and History (CEPH) at Trinity College Dublin, recognizes an economic historian whose work significantly contributes to the discipline. 

When I was an undergraduate student and took my first economics class, I was hooked. But, rather than major in economics, I chose to major in business. That’s because I wanted to understand how the economy worked at its “smallest” unit, which I surmised was the individual business.Economics can of course study individuals and their decision-making too, but at least on the supply side, I thought that a single business could be considered the smallest unit of the economy.Economic theory can tell us how firms behave in a perfectly theoretical world…but how do they actually function? This was a question that captured my attention, and I decided to major in business (with a concentration in management consulting) to understand the working world as much as I could.