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 as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment, I. Theory

(with Partha Dasgupta), Economic Journal 96, 1011-1034, 1986.

Summary. This is the first part of a two-part article which develops a theory of involuntary unemployment and the incidence of undernourishment, relates these in turn to the production and distribution of income, and ultimately to the distribution of productive assets. In this part, we study the general equilibrium of such a framework and describe its properties.

Persistent Inequality

(with Dilip Mookherjee), Review of Economic Studies 70, 369-393, 2003.

SummaryWhen human capital accumulation generates pecuniary externalities across professions, and capital markets are imperfect, persistent inequality in utility and consumption is inevitable in any steady state. 

On the Competitive Pressure Induced by the Diffusion of Innovations

(with Dilip Mookherjee), Journal of Economic Theory 54, 124-147, 1991.

Summary. We consider the decision of a dominant firm to adopt a sequence of potential cost-reducing innovations, where the latest technology adopted diffuses to a competitive fringe at an exogenous rate. With price competition on the product market, the leader optimally spaces apart the adoption dates of successive innovations, so the industry is characterized by cycles of alternating innovation and diffusion. These results may, however, be reversed in the case of quantity competition.