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.

Or use navbar and search icon at the top of this page to look for specific research areas and papers.
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
⟳ Re-randomize

Coalition Formation with Binding Agreements

(with Kyle Hyndman), Review of Economic Studies 74, 1125–1147, 2007.

Summary. We study coalition formation in “real time”, a situation in which coalition formation is intertwined with the ongoing receipt of payoffs. Agreements are assumed to be permanently binding: They can only be altered with the full consent of existing signatories. For characteristic function games we prove that equilibrium processes—whether or not these are history dependent—must converge to efficient absorbing states. For three-player games with externalities each player has enough veto power that a general efficiency result can be established. However, there exist four-player games in which all Markov equilibria are inefficient from every initial condition, despite the ability to write permanently binding agreements. Online Appendix.

Aspirations, Poverty and Economic Change

in Abhijit Banerjee, Roland Benabou and Dilip Mookherjee, What Have We Learned About Poverty?, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Summary. Introduces the idea of aspirations as a socially determined reference point. The paper argues that reachable aspirations serve to inspire, while still higher aspirations could lead to frustration.

Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment, II. Policy

(with Partha Dasgupta), Economic Journal 97, 177-188, 1987.

Summary. This is the second 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 policy options such as land reform.