As consumer credit has become increasingly central to the economy, levels of poverty and inequality have also risen. These trends are not unrelated but partly causal of each other: poverty and inequality begot credit, and credit begot inequality and poverty. This talk will explore the less-theorized role of advances in information technology and resulting changes in the availability and utilization of information in influencing the distributional outcomes due to consumer credit markets. In recent years, developments in digital technology under the “fintech” paradigm—including, notably, “alternative credit scoring” and “Open Banking”—have been promoted with a strongly pro-consumer and distributionally progressive rhetoric. In reality, however, these technological developments may be prone to producing more regressive outcomes, on balance, than is often suggested. The talk will examine potential policy reforms that could help to mitigate regressive outcomes due to technological development in consumer credit markets, while fostering more progressive outcomes.

Nikita Aggarwal is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCLA School of Law. Her research examines a range of legal and ethical questions raised by financial markets and technological change, with a focus on the welfare and distributional effects of changing information flows in credit markets. Prior to academia, she was a lawyer for the International Monetary Fund where she advised countries on financial and fiscal law reform and worked extensively on initiatives to reform the contractual framework for sovereign debt restructuring. She began her legal career at Clifford Chance LLP, where she specialized in EU financial regulation and sovereign debt restructuring. Nikita received her LL.B. at the London School of Economics and Political Science and her Ph.D. in law at the University of Oxford.

Please RSVP by Thursday, May 4th at 5:00 PM PDT