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

Bargaining Power and Enforcement in Credit Markets

(with Garance Genicot), Journal of Development Economics 79, 398-412, 2006.

Summary. In a credit market with enforcement constraints, we study the effects of a change in the outside options of a potential defaulter on the terms of the credit contract, as well as on borrower payoffs. The results crucially depend on the allocation of “bargaining power” between the borrower and the lender. We prove that there is a crucial threshold of relative weights such that if the borrower has power that exceeds this threshold, her expected utility must go up whenever her outside options come down. But if the borrower has less power than this threshold, her expected payoff must come down with her outside options.  These disparate findings within a single model permit us to interpret existing literature on credit markets in a unified way.

 

Decoding India’s Low Covid-19 Case Fatality Rate

(with Minu Philip and S. Subramanian),  Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 22, 27-51 (2021).

Summary. India’s case fatality rate (CFR) under covid-19 is strikingly low, trending from 3% or more, to a current level of under 1.8%. The world average rate is far higher. Several observers have noted that this difference is at least partly due to India’s younger age distribution. In this paper, we use age-specific fatality rates from comparison countries, coupled with India’s distribution of covid-19 cases to “predict” what India’s CFR would be with those age-specific rates. In most cases, those predictions are lower than India’s actual performance, suggesting that India’s CFR is, if anything, too high rather than too low.

Measuring Upward Mobility

(with Garance Genicot), American Economic Review 113, 3044-89 (2023). [Slides]

Summary. We develop a measure of upward mobility that distills central features of the relative and absolute approaches to measuring mobility. The former is embodied in the Growth Progressivity axiom: transfers of instantaneous growth rates from relatively rich to poor individuals increases upward mobility. The absolute approach is embodied in the Growth Alignment axiom: mobility increases with higher growth for all individuals. These axioms, along with standard auxiliary restrictions, identify a simple one-parameter family of upward mobility measures, linear in individual growth rates and exhibiting geometrically declining weights on baseline incomes. A serendipitous implication of our measure is that it does not rely on panel data, which greatly expands our analytical scope to data-poor settings.