2025 Zayira Ray
Julius Silver Professor, Faculty of Arts and Science,
Professor of Economics, New York University
Research Associate, NBER
Spool Member, ThReD
Research Fellow, CESifo


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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Certified Random: A New Order for Co-Authorship

(with Arthur Robson), American Economic Review 108, 489–520 (2018).

Summary. Certified random order (a) distributes the gain from first authorship evenly over the alphabet, (b) allows either author to signal when contributions are extremely unequal, (c) will invade an environment where alphabetical order is dominant, (d) is robust to deviations, (e) may be ex-ante more efficient than alphabetical order, and (f) is no more complex than the existing alphabetical system modified by occasional reversal of name order.

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. 

Group Formation in Risk-Sharing Arrangements

 (with Garance Genicot), Review of Economic Studies 70, 87-113, 2003.

Summary. We study informal insurance within communities, explicitly recognizing the possibility that subgroups of individuals may destabilize insurance arrangements among the larger group. We therefore consider self-enforcing risk-sharing agreements that are robust not only to single-person deviations but also to potential deviations by subgroups. Variant on an Example in the paper. A conjecture related to the paper.