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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Inequality, Control Rights, and Rent Seeking: Sugar Cooperatives in Maharashtra

(with Abhijit Banerjee, Dilip Mookherjee and Kaivan Munshi), Journal of Political Economy 109, 138-190, 2001.

Summary. This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. . Predictions concerning the effect of the distribution of local landownership on sugarcane price, capacity levels, and participation rates of different classes of farmers are confirmed by data from nearly 100 sugar cooperatives in the Indian state of Maharashtra over the period 1971–93.

Uneven Growth: A Framework for Research in Development Economics

Journal of Economic Perspectives 24 (3), Summer, 45-60, 2010.

Summary. In many developing countries, economic growth has been fundamentally uneven. This article takes the reality of “uneven growth” seriously, and uses it as an organizing device for a research program in Development Economics.

Inequality, Lobbying, and Resource Allocation

(with J. Esteban), American Economic Review 96, 257–279 (2006). Supplementary Notes.

Summary. This paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation. A government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors, but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors. They lobby the government for preferential treatment. The government—even if it honestly seeks to maximize economic efficiency—may be confounded by the possibility that both high wealth and true economic desirability create loud lobbies. Broadly speaking, both poorer economies and unequal economies display greater public misallocation. The paper warns against the conventional wisdom that this is so because such governments are more “corrupt.”