Prof. Dr. Grace Ballor

Grace Ballor studies the historical political economy of contemporary Europe, the international influence of economic actors, and the intersections of global capitalism and global governance. She is assistant professor of international economic history at Bocconi University and has held research fellowships at Harvard Business School, the European University Institute, and the Graduate Institute Geneva. Her book, Enterprise and Integration: Big Business and the Making of the Single European Market, is under contract with Cambridge University Press and she is now at work on a new project on the economic governance of risk.

Research Project

Risk Management: European governance between Crises (EURISK)

The history of contemporary Europe has often been framed through a “crisis narrative,” which casts the development of governance institutions and their policies as products of emergency response. The vast majority of governance occurs not in moments of crisis, however, but as concerted efforts to anticipate and avoid them. Grace Ballor’s project re-narrates the evolution of regional economic governance by investigating how European institutions have conceptualized and managed risk. It analyzes approaches to risk management in core competency areas of supranational governance—including growth, cohesion, and climate—and uncovers the tensions between diverse groups of policymakers, economists, and officials as they defined economic hazards, calculated event probabilities, and mitigated perceived threats during the consequential period of the 1970s to the present.