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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Aspirations and Inequality

(with Garance Genicot) Econometrica 85, 485-519, 2017. Online Appendix2009 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.

Nonpaternalistic Intergenerational Altruism

Journal of Economic Theory 41, 112-132, 1987.

Summary. The paper develops a concept of equilibrium behaviour  in a model of nonpaternalistic intergenerational altruism. When each generation’s utility depends on that of at least two successors, equilibria may be inefficient.

Internally-Negotiation-Proof Equilibrium Sets: Limit Behavior for Low Discounting

Games and Economic Behavior 6, 162-177, 1994.

Summary. Recent literature in the theory of dynamic games addresses renegotiatioin-proof equilibria, For repeated games, I analyze the limit of renegotiation-proof equilibrium sets as discounting vanishes. The main result states that such limit sets must either be singletons or belong to the Pareto frontier of the convex hull of the feasible set of the stage game payoffs.