Ciarán O'Flynn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, where he works on the Research on Economic Security and Peace (RESP) project. He holds a PhD in Political Economy and International Affairs from the University of St.Gallen. He was previously a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow and a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick, with earlier postdoctoral posts at King's College London and the University of St.Gallen.

His research is in international political economy and concerns the structural power of firms in public governance. On corporate tax, he studies how Ireland has held onto its tax policy autonomy under US pressure and how professional services firms help create and sustain tax avoidance strategies. This is the subject of his book, The Golden Cage of Tax Avoidance: How States Rebalance Corporate Power, under contract with Edinburgh University Press. On finance, he works on how the banks that advise the Federal Reserve shape monetary policy and on the governance of transnational financial regulators. Both areas share the same underlying problem: regulated actors who sit inside the arrangements meant to regulate them. His research has been published in Competition & Change and Politics.