Alya Guseva

Alya Guseva is an economic sociologist with interests in the market formation, particularly the development of new financial and consumer markets in emerging economies of Eastern and Central Europe. Her dissertation research on Russia’s emerging credit card market culminated in the publication of Into the Red: The Birth of the Credit Card Market in Postcommunist Russia(Stanford University Press, 2008). Another book on this subject (together with Akos Rona-Tas from the University of California, San Diego) entitled Plastic Money: Constructing Markets for Credit Cards in Eight Postcommunist Countries is a comparative-historical analysis of developing credit card markets in Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, China and Vietnam. The project was supported by the American National Science Foundation, and in addition to the book, resulted in several articles on law and finance, inequality and credit, technological standards and the state.