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.

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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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A Concept of Egalitarianism Under Participation Constraints

(with Bhaskar Dutta), Econometrica 57, 615-635, 1989.

Summary. We introduce a new solution concept for transferable-utility games in characteristic function form, when individuals collectively believe in equality as a desirable social goal, although in their private actions they behave selfishly. This latter consideration implies that an “egalitarian solution” must satisfy core-like participation constraints, while the former implies that such a solution is also a Lorenz-maximal element of the constrained set. Despite the well-known fact that the Lorenz ordering is incomplete, we show that the egalitarian solution is unique whenever it exists.

Missing Unmarried Women

(with Siwan Anderson), Journal of the European Economic Association 2019 17(5), 1585–1616; jvy027, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvy027

Summary. We provide systematic estimates of the excess female mortality faced by older unmarried women in developing regions. We place these estimates in the context of the missing women phenomenon. There are approximately 1.5 million missing women between the ages of 30 and 60 years old each year. We find that 35% of these missing women of adult age can be attributed to not being married. These estimates vary by region. India has the largest proportion of missing adult women who are without a husband, followed by the countries in East Africa. By contrast, China has almost no missing unmarried women. We show that 70% of missing unmarried women are of reproductive age and that it is the relatively high mortality rates of these young unmarried women (compared to their married counterparts) that drive this phenomenon.

Informal Insurance in Social Networks

(with Francis Bloch and Garance Genicot), Journal of Economic Theory 143, 36-58, 2008.

Summary. This paper studies bilateral insurance schemes across networks of individuals.  We investigate the structure of self-enforcing insurance networks. Network links play two distinct and possibly conflictual roles. They act as conduits for both transfers and information; affecting the scope for insurance and the severity of punishments upon noncompliance. Their interaction leads to a characterization of stable networks as suitably “sparse” networks. Thickly and thinly connected networks tend to be stable, whereas intermediate degrees of connectedness jeopardize stability.