Rate My Professor Alexander Slaski

Alexander Slaski is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, teaching courses in international relations, international political economy, and climate and energy politics to both undergraduate and graduate students. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2018. His dissertation, chaired by Helen Milner and with committee members Deborah Yashar, Faisal Ahmed, and Daniela Campello, is titled “Multinational Investment and Domestic Policymaking in Latin America.” Slaski earned his B.A. in Economics and International Relations from Stanford University. Prior to graduate school, he served as head researcher at Stanford’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. After completing his doctorate, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Tulane University’s Center for Inter-American Policy and Research and Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies (2018-2020), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Leiden University contributing to a European Research Council-funded project on sovereign debt. He also worked as a policy analyst at the Center for Global Development, focusing on aligning private investment with global public goods in climate innovation and energy technologies.

Slaski’s research expertise lies in comparative and international political economy, particularly the politics of foreign direct investment (FDI), investment incentives, and multinational firms in Latin America and the Global South. He explores how international financial flows such as FDI, currency flows, resource rents, portfolio investment, and sovereign debt shape distributional conflicts, demands for regulation, and policymaking in developing democracies. His book manuscript under development, “Investing in Influence: Multinational Firms and Political Power in Developing Economies,” examines coalition formation between multinationals and domestic firms to influence regulatory policy. Utilizing a multi-method toolkit—including machine learning, Bayesian methods, process tracing, game theory, and conjoint surveys—Slaski has published in top journals. Select publications are: “FDI, Pollution, and Public Opinion of Multinational Corporations” (with Celeste Beesley; forthcoming, Review of International Political Economy); “Policy Signaling and Foreign Electoral Uncertainty: Implications for Currency Markets” (International Studies Quarterly, 2021); “Explaining Deference: Why and When Do Policymakers Think FDI Needs Tax Incentives?” (with Sarah Bauerle Danzman; Review of International Political Economy, 2021); “Incentivizing Embedded Investment: Evidence from Patterns of Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America” (with Sarah Bauerle Danzman; Review of International Organizations, 2021); and “Competing to Lose: FDI, Investment Incentives, and Taxation Capacity under Fiscal Federalism” (Business and Politics, 2025).