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.

Or use navbar and search icon at the top of this page to look for specific research areas and papers.
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
⟳ Re-randomize

Internally-Negotiation-Proof Equilibrium Sets: Limit Behavior for Low Discounting

Games and Economic Behavior 6, 162-177, 1994.

Summary. Recent literature in the theory of dynamic games addresses renegotiatioin-proof equilibria, For repeated games, I analyze the limit of renegotiation-proof equilibrium sets as discounting vanishes. The main result states that such limit sets must either be singletons or belong to the Pareto frontier of the convex hull of the feasible set of the stage game payoffs.

Cooperation in Community Interaction without Information Flows

(with Parikshit Ghosh), Review of Economic Studies 63, 491–519, 1996.

Summary. We study cooperative behavior in communities where the flow of information regarding past conduct is limited or missing. Players are initially randomly matched with no knowledge of each other’s past actions; they endogenously decide whether or not to continue
the repeated relationship. We define social equilibrium in such communities. Such equilibria
are characterized by an initial testing phase, followed by cooperation if the test is successful. It is precisely the presence of myopic types that permit cooperation, by raising barriers to entry into new relationships.

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.