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.
≋ Three Randomly Selected Papers
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The Age Distribution of Missing Women in India

(with Siwan Anderson), Economic & Political Weekly 47, No. 47-48, December, 2012.

Summary. Relative to developed countries, there are far fewer women than men in India. Estimates suggest that among the stock of women who could potentially be alive today, over 25 million are “missing”. Sex selection at birth and the mistreatment of young girls are widely regarded as key explanations. We provide a decomposition of missing women by age across the states. While we do not dispute the existence of severe gender bias at young ages, our computations yield some striking findings. First, the vast majority of missing women in India are of adult age. Second, there is significant variation in the distribution of missing women by age across different states. Missing girls at birth are most pervasive in some north-western states, but excess female mortality at older ages is relatively low. In contrast, some north-eastern states have the highest excess female mortality in adulthood but the lowest number of missing women at birth.

Contracts with Interdependent Preferences

(with Marek Weretka), February 2025.

Summary.  A principal contracts with a team of agents with interdependent preferences. We characterize cost effective contracts, and relate the direction of co-movement in rewards — “joint liability” (positive) or “tournaments” (negative) — to the assumed structure of preference interdependence.  We identify two asymmetries. First, the optimal contract leans towards joint liability rather than tournaments, especially in larger teams, in a sense made precise in the paper. Second, when the mechanism-design problem is augmented by robustness constraints designed to eliminate multiple equilibria, the principal may prefer teams linked via adversarial rather than altruistic preferences.

A Theory of Occupational Choice with Endogenous Fertility

(with Dilip Mookherjee and Silvia Prina), American Economic Journal: Microeconomics  4, 1–34, 2012.

Summary. Theories based on partial equilibrium reasoning alone cannot explain the widespread negative cross-sectional correlation between parental wages and fertility, without restrictive assumptions on preferences and childcare costs. We argue that incorporating a dynamic general equilibrium analysis of returns to human capital can help explain observed empirical patterns.