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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The Great Gatsby Curve: Upward Mobility, Persistence and Inequality

(with Garance Genicot and Laura Mayoral). December 2025.

Summary.  This paper revisits the Great Gatsby curve that connects inequality to mobility, using panel data spanning several countries and time periods. Existing literature observes that the intergenerational elasticity of earnings is positively correlated with inequality, implying that mobility (viewed as the negative of that elasticity) decreases with inequality. In sharp contrast, we show that measures of upward mobility, axiomatically based on progressivity in income growth rates, are robustly and positively associated with baseline inequality. While there is no logical contradiction here, our study highlights crucial differences between mobility measures based on (lower) persistence and those based on growth progressivity, and asks the reader to align their choice of measure with foundational criteria that they feel best describe “mobility.” Our findings offer a re-interpretation of the Gatsby curve through the lens of shared prosperity, and have implications for the evolution of inequality within countries.

On the Salience of Ethnic Conflict

(with Joan Esteban), American Economic Review 98:5, 2185–2202, 2008. Online Appendix.

Summary. “In much of Asia and Africa, it is only modest hyperbole to assert that the Marxian prophecy has had an ethnic fulfillment.” — Donald Horowitz (1985).

Inequality, Lobbying, and Resource Allocation

(with J. Esteban), American Economic Review 96, 257–279 (2006). Supplementary Notes.

Summary. This paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation. A government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors, but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors. They lobby the government for preferential treatment. The government—even if it honestly seeks to maximize economic efficiency—may be confounded by the possibility that both high wealth and true economic desirability create loud lobbies. Broadly speaking, both poorer economies and unequal economies display greater public misallocation. The paper warns against the conventional wisdom that this is so because such governments are more “corrupt.”