(with Joan Esteban), American Economic Review 98:5, 2185–2202, 2008. Online Appendix.
Summary. “In much of Asia and Africa, it is only modest hyperbole to assert that the Marxian prophecy has had an ethnic fulfillment.” — Donald Horowitz (1985).
Julius Silver Professor, Faculty of Arts and Science, and Professor of Economics, New York University
Research Associate, NBER
Part-Time Professor, University of Warwick
Council Member, Game Theory Society
Research Fellow, CESifo
Board Member, BREAD and ThReD
Researcher in Residence, ESOP
Department of Economics, NYU, 19 West 4th Street
New York, NY 10012, U.S.A.
debraj.ray@nyu.edu, +1 (212)-998-8906.
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Oxford University Press, 2008. This book is now open-access; feel free to download a copy, and to buy the print version if you like the book.
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Aspirations and Inequality
(with Garance Genicot) Econometrica 85, 485-519, 2017. Online Appendix. 2009 version.
Summary. This paper develops a theory of socially determined aspirations, and the interaction of those aspirations with growth and inequality. The interaction is bidirectional: economy-wide outcomes determine individual aspirations, which in turn determine investment incentives and social outcomes. Thus aspirations, income, and the distribution of income evolve jointly.
Measuring Upward Mobility
(with Garance Genicot). This version February 2023. Forthcoming, American Economic Review. [Slides]
Summary. We develop a measure of upward mobility that distills central features of the relative and absolute approaches to measuring mobility. The former is embodied in the Growth Progressivity axiom: transfers of instantaneous growth rates from relatively rich to poor individuals increases upward mobility. The absolute approach is embodied in the Growth Alignment axiom: mobility increases with higher growth for all individuals. These axioms, along with standard auxiliary restrictions, identify a simple one-parameter family of upward mobility measures, linear in individual growth rates and exhibiting geometrically declining weights on baseline incomes. A serendipitous implication of our measure is that it does not rely on panel data, which greatly expands our analytical scope to data-poor settings.