John W. O'Hagan

John W. O'Hagan has worked at Trinity College Dublin since 1970, specialising as a Professor of Economics since 2005 and a Professor Emeritus since October 2016. A highly educated individual, John obtained his BE in Electrical Engineering in 1967, BA in Economics and Politics in 1969 and his MA in Economics in 1970, all at University College Dublin. He obtained his PhD in Economics from Trinity College Dublin in 1976.

In the past, John was a visiting Scholar/Professor at the universities of York and Bath in England, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark (four times), Cologne University (twice) and Witten/Herdecke University (Germany). He was the College Bursar from 2001 to 2005 and was awarded the Provost’s Life-Time Teaching Award in 2009. He still gives a module of lectures on the European Economy in the Junior Sophister year (60-70 students).

President of the annual undergraduate journal, Student Economic Review (SER), from 1987 to 2016, John was also the Lead Academic Figure in developing both the 2012 and  2020 successful Grattan PhD Scholarship programme in the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy. John has also sat on the Executive Board of the Association of Cultural Economics International from 1996 to 2002, and as President from 1998 to 2000. Appointed as the ninth Honorary Fellow of the Association in 2021, John has also been centrally involved in the past with five major government-appointed bodies, dealing with: Long-term Unemployment, the Arts and Local Government, Local Government Financing, Value for Money in the Arts, and Spending Reviews.

John's research has covered two main areas; the economics of the arts, especially the migration and clustering of creative workers, and the Economy of Ireland. In relation to the latter, he was editor or co-editor of fourteen editions of the popular Economy of Ireland book, between 1975 and 2021. John's main project work over the last ten years has focussed on spatial dimensions of the output of creative writers and economists, in a historical context. Some of his former PhD students in this area have already published extensively in this area, including in top journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Urban Economics, European Economic Review, and Review of Economics and Statistics. Current research is devoted to the economic and technological challenges confronting orchestras.