Rachel Wellhausen
Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance
Princeton University

Assistant Professor, Department of Government
Faculty Affiliate, McCombs School of Business
University of Texas at Austin

rwellhausen at utexas.edu
Twitter: @goodhouses

442A Robertson Hall
Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544

Rachel Wellhausen is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. She is an Assistant Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin and a faculty affiliate at the McCombs School of Business (on leave 2012-2013).

Rachel's primary field of interest is the political economy of international investment and finance. Her book manuscript, The Shield of Nationality: Foreign Firms in Emerging Economies, examines the conditions under which governments maintain or break the contracts they enter into with foreign investors. She finds that investor nationality is a key determinant of contract sanctity and that governments hosting investors from a greater diversity of countries gain space to trade off contract sanctity in favor of domestic goals. Evidence includes cross-national quantitative analysis and casework drawn from over 130 interviews of foreign investors in Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, with follow-up work in Russia and Azerbaijan.

Rachel also has interests in technology, manufacturing, and public policy. She is co-editor of a forthcoming volume produced by MIT's interdisciplinary project on Production in the Innovation Economy. 

Rachel received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She holds a M.Sc. with Distinction in European Political Economy: Transition from the London School of Economics. She is a graduate of the Honors College at the University of Arizona and holds a B.A. in Economics, a B.A. in English with Honors, and a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies (Russian and Slavic Studies, German Studies, and Political Science). Rachel has experience living and working in London; Irkutsk, Russia; and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe.