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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A Concept of Egalitarianism Under Participation Constraints

(with Bhaskar Dutta), Econometrica 57, 615-635, 1989.

Summary. We introduce a new solution concept for transferable-utility games in characteristic function form, when individuals collectively believe in equality as a desirable social goal, although in their private actions they behave selfishly. This latter consideration implies that an “egalitarian solution” must satisfy core-like participation constraints, while the former implies that such a solution is also a Lorenz-maximal element of the constrained set. Despite the well-known fact that the Lorenz ordering is incomplete, we show that the egalitarian solution is unique whenever it exists.

Inequality and Markets: Some Implications of Occupational Diversity

(with Dilip Mookherjee), American Economic Journal Microeconomics 2 38–76, 2010.

Summary. This paper studies income distribution in an economy with borrowing constraints. If the span of occupational investments is large, long-run wealth distributions display persistent inequality. With a “rich” set of occupations, so that training costs form an interval, the distribution is unique and the average return to education must rise with educational investment. 

The Time Structure of Self-Enforcing Agreements

Econometrica 70, 547–582, 2002.

Summary. A principal and an agent enter into a sequence of agreements. The principal faces an interim participation constraint at each date, but can commit to the current agreement; in contrast, the agent has the opportunity to renege on the current agreement.  We show that every constrained efficient sequence must, after a finite number of dates, exhibit a continuation that maximizes the agent’s payoff over all such sequences.