2025 Zayira Ray
Julius Silver Professor, Faculty of Arts and Science,
Professor of Economics, New York University
Research Associate, NBER
Part-Time Professor, University of Warwick
Research Fellow, CESifo
Spool Member, ThReD

Department of Economics, 
New York University,
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.
≋ Three Randomly Selected Papers
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Missing Unmarried Women

(with Siwan Anderson), Journal of the European Economic Association 2019 17(5), 1585–1616; jvy027, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvy027

Summary. We provide systematic estimates of the excess female mortality faced by older unmarried women in developing regions. We place these estimates in the context of the missing women phenomenon. There are approximately 1.5 million missing women between the ages of 30 and 60 years old each year. We find that 35% of these missing women of adult age can be attributed to not being married. These estimates vary by region. India has the largest proportion of missing adult women who are without a husband, followed by the countries in East Africa. By contrast, China has almost no missing unmarried women. We show that 70% of missing unmarried women are of reproductive age and that it is the relatively high mortality rates of these young unmarried women (compared to their married counterparts) that drive this phenomenon.

Farsighted Network Formation

(with Bhaskar Dutta and Sayantan Ghosal), Journal of Economic Theory 122, 143 – 164, 2005.

Summary. This paper studies a model of dynamic network formation when individuals are farsighted: players evaluate the desirability of a “current” move in terms of its consequences on the entire discounted stream of payoffs. We define a concept of equilibrium which takes into account farsighted behavior of agents and allows for limited cooperation amongst agents.

The Great Gatsby Curve: Upward Mobility, Persistence and Inequality

(with Garance Genicot and Laura Mayoral). December 2025.

Summary.  This paper revisits the Great Gatsby curve that connects inequality to mobility, using panel data spanning several countries and time periods. Existing literature observes that the intergenerational elasticity of earnings is positively correlated with inequality, implying that mobility (viewed as the negative of that elasticity) decreases with inequality. In sharp contrast, we show that measures of upward mobility, axiomatically based on progressivity in income growth rates, are robustly and positively associated with baseline inequality. While there is no logical contradiction here, our study highlights crucial differences between mobility measures based on (lower) persistence and those based on growth progressivity, and asks the reader to align their choice of measure with foundational criteria that they feel best describe “mobility.” Our findings offer a re-interpretation of the Gatsby curve through the lens of shared prosperity, and have implications for the evolution of inequality within countries.