Dr. Gal Bitton-Alayof is a postdoctoral researcher at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is also affiliated with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Center for American Political Studies. Prior to joining M-RCBG, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Tel Aviv University in February 2025, where she was an Azrieli Graduate Fellows Program fellow.
Her research lies at the intersection of international political economy and political psychology, examining how identity, cognition, and institutional context shape financial decision-making and global economic behavior. She studies topics such as financial liberalization, cultural finance, citizen–state interactions in global markets, and public attitudes toward redistribution and welfare policy. She is also broadly interested in how individuals form foreign policy preferences and how voters evaluate international cooperation, especially under conditions of uncertainty, threat, or shifting global alignments. Methodologically, she integrates behavioral experiments, survey research, individual-level decision tasks, and large-N observational data, employing both experimental and quasi-experimental designs to identify the microfoundations of macro-level political and financial dynamics.