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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Hindu-Muslim Violence in India: A Postscript from the 21st Century

(with Anirban Mitra), in Advances in the Economics of Religion (J-P Carvalho, S. Iyer and J. Rubin, eds.) Volume 158, International Economic Association Series, Palgrave Macmillan (2019).

Summary.  We revisit and extend the core issues studied in Mitra and Ray (2014). The main reason behind this retrospection is to check if the robust empirical patterns recorded there persist once we consider a longer time frame extending into the 21st century. We make three observations: (i) There is a clear economic component to violence, roughly along the lines of our earlier paper; (ii)  There is a new aspect which is assuming salience now — namely, a strong political component which is manifesting itself through the presence of BJP legislators; (iii) Ahmedabad exemplifies the ascendancy of this political component. 

Nit-Piketty

CesIfo Economic Studies 2015.

Summary. Yes, capital must displace labor, but not because r > g. This article is based on this blog post, Branko Milanovic objected here; I replied. Piketty replies to some of his critics here.

 

The Phelps–Koopmans Theorem and Potential Optimality

International Journal of Economic Theory 6 11–28, 2010.

Summary. The Phelps–Koopmans theorem states that if every limit point of a path of capital stocks exceeds the “golden rule,” then that path is inefficient: there is another feasible path from the same initial stock that provides at least as much consumption at every date and strictly more consumption at some date. I show that in a model with nonconvex technologies and preferences, the theorem is false in a strong sense. Not only can there be efficient paths with capital stocks forever above and bounded away from a unique golden rule, such paths can also be optimal under the infinite discounted sum of a one-period utility function.