(with Dilip Mookherjee), American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings) 92, 253–259, 2002.
Summary. We explore the view, further developed in our other work, that inequality is an inevitable consequence of the market mechanism.
Julius Silver Professor, Faculty of Arts and Science, and Professor of Economics, New York University
Research Associate, NBER
Part-Time Professor, University of Warwick
Council Member, Game Theory Society
Research Fellow, CESifo
Board Member, BREAD and ThReD
Researcher in Residence, ESOP
Department of Economics, NYU, 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.
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Ethnicity and Conflict: Theory and Facts
(with Joan Esteban and Laura Mayoral), Science 336, 858 – 865, 2012.
Summary. Over the second half of the 20th century, conflicts within national boundaries became increasingly dominant. Many (if not most) such conflicts involved violence along ethnic lines. On the basis of recent theoretical and empirical research, we provide evidence that preexisting ethnic divisions do influence social conflict. Our analysis also points to particular channels of influence. Specifically, we show that two different measures of ethnic division—polarization and fractionalization—jointly influence conflict, the former more so when the winners enjoy a “public” prize (such as political power or religious hegemony), the latter more so when the prize is “private” (such as looted resources, government subsidies, or infrastructures).
On the Competitive Pressure Induced by the Diffusion of Innovations
(with Dilip Mookherjee), Journal of Economic Theory 54, 124-147, 1991.
Summary. We consider the decision of a dominant firm to adopt a sequence of potential cost-reducing innovations, where the latest technology adopted diffuses to a competitive fringe at an exogenous rate. With price competition on the product market, the leader optimally spaces apart the adoption dates of successive innovations, so the industry is characterized by cycles of alternating innovation and diffusion. These results may, however, be reversed in the case of quantity competition.