European Central Bank awards grant to research team led by Professor Ventoruzzo

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The European Central Bank (ECB) has awarded a grant to a research team led by Marco Ventoruzzo, professor of law and Arthur L. and Sandra S. Piccone Faculty Scholar at Penn State Law, to examine judicial review of central bank policies and decisions in a comparative perspective.

The highly competitive grant is part of the 2017 ECB Legal Research Program. The researchers will explore judicial review of acts of the ECB and the national central banks of European Union member states. They will compare the justiciability regime in different jurisdictions with a goal of discovering the why some bank policy decisions receive different judicial protection.  

“We want to offer a clear and detailed picture of judicial review of the Central Bank’s decisions in different member states and at the EU level,” said Ventoruzzo. “Then we want to conduct an empirical analysis of judicial control of central banks acts in major European jurisdictions and by the Court of Justice of the European Union in the last decade and, finally, we want to identify the most delicate open issues.”

Ventoruzzo holds a joint appointment with Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, and his research team includes colleagues from the RULES research unit of Bocconi's BAFFI-CAREFIN Centre—Filippo Annunziata, Piergaetano Marchetti, and Donato Masciandaro—as well as Lorenzo Cuocolo of the University of Genoa, Thierry Bonneau of Université Paris II, Burkhard Hess of Max Planck Luxembourg, Klaus Hopt of Max Planck Hamburg, and Niamh Moloney of the London School of Economics.

The project will be presented by Ventoruzzo at a conference organized by the ECB in June in Frankfurt, Germany.