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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Wages and Involuntary Unemployment in the Slack Season of a Village Economy

(with Anindita Mukherjee), Journal of Development Economics 37, 227-264, 1992.

Summary. We model slack season wages in a village economy, in the presence of involuntary unemployment. Our model draws its inspiration from sociological notions of ‘everyday peasant resistance’.  A continuum of equilibrium wage configurations is obtained. These configurations, barring one, involve wages exceeding reservation wages, despite the presence of involuntary unemployment.

Ethnicity and Conflict: An Empirical Study

(with Joan Esteban and Laura. Mayoral), American Economic Review 102, 1310-1342, 2012. Online Appendix.

Summary. We examine empirically the impact of ethnic divisions on conflict, by using a specification based on Esteban and Ray (2011). That theory links conflict intensity to three indices of ethnic distribution: polarization, fractionalization, and the Gini-Greenberg index. The empirical analysis verifies that these distributional measures are significant correlates of conflict. These effects persist as we introduce country-specific measures of group cohesion and of the importance of public goods, and combine them with the distributional measures exactly as described by the theory.

Maximality in the Farsighted Stable Set

(with Rajiv Vohra)   Econometrica 87(5), 1763–1779 Online Appendix.

SummaryThe stable set of von Neumann and Morgenstern can be extended to cover farsighted coalitional deviations, as proposed by Harsanyi (1974), and more recently reformulated by Ray and Vohra (2015). However,  while coalitional deviations improve on existing outcomes, coalitions might do even better by moving elsewhere. Or other coalitions might intervene to impose their favored moves. We show that every farsighted stable set satisfying some reasonable, and easily verifiable, properties is unaffected by the imposition of this stringent maximality requirement.