Alya Guseva Bio

Alya Guseva is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Her interests include market emergence and consumer credit, especially in the context of the East European postcommunist transition. She is the author of Into the Red: The Birth of the Credit Card Market in Postcommunist Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). For this project, she conducted a series of interviews with representatives of Russia’s banks in 1998-1999 and 2003-2005. Professor Guseva is currently working on a comparative institutional analysis of credit card markets in the postcommunist world, this time focusing on Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, China and Vietnam (in collaboration with Akos Rona-Tas of UCSD).  You can direct your questions and comments to aguseva@bu.edu.