Debraj Ray
Biographic Data
| ID | 183293 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debraj Ray |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debraj |
| FAMILY NAME | Ray |
| SIGNATURE | RAY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5840-3051 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 446 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Upward Mobility in Developing Countries
This article provides an overview of the literature on mobility in developing countries.Explicit distinctions are drawn between directional and non-directional measures, absolute and relative measures, and combinations thereof.We note that the scarcity of panel data has hindered the measurement of mobility for many countries.We pay particular attention to the recent development of panel-free mobility measures, which allows us to measure upward mo…
The Social Equilibrium of Relational Arrangements
The enforcement of relational contracts is especially challenging for anonymous environments in which new partnerships can be started after a transgression. Building on Ghosh and Ray (1996), we study bilateral partnership norms that exhibit gradually increasing cooperation, thereby deterring deviations. But such gradualism must be incentive-compatible for partners. We argue that incomplete information regarding partner patience solves this proble…
Past and Future: Backward and Forward Discounting
We study a model of time preference in which both current consumption and the memory of past consumption enter “experienced utility”—or the felicity—of an individual. An individual derives overall utility from her own felicity and the anticipated felicities of future selves. These postulates permit an agent to anticipate future regret in current decisions, and generate a set of novel testable implications in line with empirical evidence. The mode…
Decoding India's Low Covid-19 Case Fatality Rate
India's case fatality rate (CFR) under Covid-19 is strikingly low, around 1.7% at the time of writing. The world average rate is far higher. Several observers have noted that this difference is at least partly due to India's younger age distribution. We use age-specific fatality rates from 17 comparison countries, coupled with India's distribution of Covid-19 cases, to “predict” India's CFR. In most cases, those predictions yield even lower numbe…
Groups in conflict: Private and public prizes
Games of Love and Hate
A strategic situation with payoff-based externalities is one in which a player’s payoff depends on her own action and others’ payoffs. We place restrictions on the resulting interdependent utility system that generate a standard normal form, referred to as a “game of love and hate.” Our central theorem states that every equilibrium of a game of love and hate is Pareto optimal. While externalities are restricted to flow only through payoffs, there…
Aspirations and Inequality
The premise of this paper is twofold. First, people’s aspirations for their future wellbeing (or that of their children) aect their incentives to invest. Second, the experiences of others help shape one’s aspirations. This paper marries a model of aspirations-based choice with a simple theory of aspirations formation to study the relationship between aspirations and the distribution of income. Through its impact on investments, aspirations aect e…
States of Spiritual Awareness by Time, Activity, and Social Interaction
We explore how people experience the sacred in their everyday lives using a recently developed research technique-smartphone-based experience sampling method (S-ESM). The primary goal of our experience-driven approach is to explore the contours and variations of spiritual awareness within people's day-to-day lives. We seek to better understand when and where spiritual awareness is likely to arise, and the contexts in which it is rare. Our smartph…
Information and Enforcement in Informal Credit Markets
We study loan enforcement in informal credit markets with multiple lenders but no sharing of credit histories, and derive the dynamics of loan size and interest rates for relational lending. In the presence of a sufficient fraction of ‘natural defaulters’, the rest of the market can be incentivized against default by micro-rationing—sharper credit limits and possibly higher interest rates that serve as gateways into new borrowing relationships. W…
Aspirations and the Development Treadmill
I describe a positive theory of socially determined aspirations, and some implications of that theory for the study of economic inequality and social conflict. The main contribution of the theory is that it attempts to describe, in the same explanatory arc, how a change in aspirations can be inspirational in some circumstances, or a source of frustration and resentment in others. These different reactions arise from the aspirational gap: the diff…
Class Inequality and Adult Attainment Projects among Middle-Aged Men in the United States, 1980-2010
Jeremy Pais, D. Matthew Ray Sociological Science, April 29, 2015 DOI 10.15195/v2.a11 Abstract Adult attainment projects (AAP) consist of a series of traditional adult statuses: labor force participation, residential independence, marriage, parenthood, and homeownership
Implications of an Economic Theory of Conflict: Hindu-Muslim Violence in India
We model intergroup conflict driven by economic changes within groups. We show that if group incomes are low, increasing group incomes raises violence against that group and lowers violence generated by it. We then apply the model to data on Hindu-Muslim violence in India. Our main result is that an increase in per capita Muslim expenditures generates a large and significant increase in future religious conflict. An increase in Hindu expenditures…
Ethnicity and Conflict: An Empirical Study
We examine empirically the impact of ethnic divisions on conflict, by using a specification based on Esteban and Ray (2011). That theory links conflict intensity to three indices of ethnic distribution: polarization, fractionalization, and the Gini-Greenberg index. The empirical analysis verifies that these distributional measures are significant correlates of conflict. These effects persist as we introduce country-specific measures of group cohe…
Linking Conflict to Inequality and Polarization
In this paper we study a behavioral model of conflict that provides a basis for choosing certain indices of dispersion as indicators for conflict. We show that a suitable monotone transform of the equilibrium level of conflict can be proxied by a linear function of the Gini coefficient, the Herfindahl-Hirschman fractionalization index, and a specific measure of polarization due to Esteban and Ray. (JEL D31, D63, D74)
Missing Women: Age and Disease
Relative to developed countries and some parts of the developing world, most notably sub-Saharan Africa, there are far fewer women than men in India and China. It has been argued that as many as a 100 million women could be missing. The possibility of gender bias at birth and the mistreatment of young girls are widely regarded as key explanations. We provide a decomposition of these missing women by age and cause of death. While we do not dispute…
Uneven Growth: A Framework for Research in Development Economics
The textbook paradigm of economywide development rests on the premise of "balanced growth": that is, on the presumption that all sectors will grow in unison over time as a country gets richer. Of course, we would all agree that balanced growth is an abstraction. In many developing countries, economic growth has been fundamentally uneven. The question really is not whether growth is balanced-it isn't-but whether the abstraction is a useful one. Fo…
On the Salience of Ethnic Conflict
A classical theme in social analysis views economic class divisions as the main cause of social conflict. Yet many, if not most of the conflicts we observe today appear to be ethnic in nature. It appears that the "vertical" nature of class divisions is often dominated by the "horizontal" antagonisms across groups delineated by noneconomic markers. This paper highlights the perverse synergy of economic inequality within ethnic groups, and its role…
Informal insurance in social networks
Polarization, Fractionalization and Conflict
This article provides a theoretical framework that distinguishes between the occurrence of conflict and its severity, and clarifies the role of polarization and fractionalization in each of these cases. The analysis helps in ordering the various definitions, and in providing explanations for the empirical observations on the relationship between conflict, on the one hand, and polarization or fractionalization, on the other. The behaviour of playe…
Inequality and Inefficiency in Joint Projects
nA group of agents voluntarily participates in a joint project, in which efforts are not perfectly substitutable. The output is divided according to some given vector of shares. A share vector is unimprovable if no other share vector yields a higher sum of payoffs. When the elasticity of substitution across efforts is two or lower, only the perfectly equal share vector is unimprovable, and all other vectors can be improved via Lorenz domination. …
Inhibition of Amazon Deforestation and Fire by Parks and Indigenous Lands
Conservation scientists generally agree that many types of protected areas will be needed to protect tropical forests. But little is known of the comparative performance of inhabited and uninhabited reserves in slowing the most extreme form of forest disturbance: conversion to agriculture. We used satellite‐based maps of land cover and fire occurrence in the Brazilian Amazon to compare the performance of large (>10,000 ha) uninhabited (parks) and…
Aspirations, Poverty, and Economic Change
This essay discusses a particular aspect of poverty: its close and brutal association with a failure of aspirations. This is not an assertion about individuals who are poor; it is a statement about the condition of poverty itself. Poverty stifles dreams, or at least the process of attaining dreams. Thus, poverty and the failure of aspirations may be reciprocally linked in a self-sustaining trap. This essay seeks to draw out various aspects of thi…
An Extension of a Measure of Polarization, with an application to the income distribution of five OECD countries
Bargaining power and enforcement in credit markets
Polarization: Concepts, Measurement, Estimation
We develop the measurement theory of polarization for the case in which income distributions can be described using density functions. The main theorem uniquely characterizes a class of polarization measures that fits into what we call the “identity-alienation” framework, and simultanously satisfies a set of axioms. Second, we provide sample estimators of population polarization indices that can be used to compare polarization across time or enti…
Collective Action and the Group Size Paradox
According to the Olson paradox, larger groups may be less successful than smaller groups in furthering their interests. We address the issue in a model with three distinctive features: explicit intergroup interaction, collective prizes with a varying mix of public and private characteristics, and nonlinear lobbying costs. The interplay of these features leads to new results. When the cost of lobbying has the elasticity of a quadratic function, or…
Aspirations and Inequality
The premise of this paper is twofold. First, people’s aspirations for their future wellbeing (or that of their children) aect their incentives to invest. Second, the experiences of others help shape one’s aspirations. This paper marries a model of aspirations-based choice with a simple theory of aspirations formation to study the relationship between aspirations and the distribution of income. Through its impact on investments, aspirations aect e…
Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Theory
Journal Article Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Theory Get access Partha Dasgupta, Partha Dasgupta University of Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Debraj Ray Debraj Ray Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, and Stanford University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 96, Issue 384, 1 December 1986, Pages 1…
Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Policy
This paper explores the policy implications that are obtained once it is recognized that at low nutrition intakes a person's productivity is an increasing function of intake. In the context of a fully general equilibrium model it is shown that if aggregate assets in an economy are neither large nor small, certain patterns of Lorenz improving asset redistributions (or nutrition transfers) increase aggregate output and reduce the volume of involunt…
Implications of an Economic Theory of Conflict: Hindu-Muslim Violence in India
We model intergroup conflict driven by economic changes within groups. We show that if group incomes are low, increasing group incomes raises violence against that group and lowers violence generated by it. We then apply the model to data on Hindu-Muslim violence in India. Our main result is that an increase in per capita Muslim expenditures generates a large and significant increase in future religious conflict. An increase in Hindu expenditures…
Polarization, Fractionalization and Conflict
This article provides a theoretical framework that distinguishes between the occurrence of conflict and its severity, and clarifies the role of polarization and fractionalization in each of these cases. The analysis helps in ordering the various definitions, and in providing explanations for the empirical observations on the relationship between conflict, on the one hand, and polarization or fractionalization, on the other. The behaviour of playe…
Inequality, Control Rights, and Rent Seeking: Sugar Cooperatives in Maharashtra
This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights wielded by wealthier members. Transfers of rents to the latter are achieved by depressing prices paid for inputs supplied by members and diverting resulting …
An Extension of a Measure of Polarization, with an application to the income distribution of five OECD countries
Coalitional Power and Public Goods
We study the provision of public goods when all agents have complete information and can write binding agreements. This framework is in deliberate contrast to a traditional view of the free-rider problem based on hidden information or voluntary provision. We focus on coalition formation as a potential source of inefficiency. To this end, we develop a notion of an equilibrium coalition structure, based on the assumption that each coalition that fo…
Labor tying
We study labor-tying in a competitive agricultural economy. The co-existence of seasonal fluctuations in income and imperfect credit markets suggests that tied contracts should dominate casual labor markets. However, empirical observation from India suggests that this is far from being the case, and indeed, that there is a declining trend in labor tying. We consider a model that permits deviations ex-post from mutually agreed implicit contracts. …
Uneven Growth: A Framework for Research in Development Economics
The textbook paradigm of economywide development rests on the premise of "balanced growth": that is, on the presumption that all sectors will grow in unison over time as a country gets richer. Of course, we would all agree that balanced growth is an abstraction. In many developing countries, economic growth has been fundamentally uneven. The question really is not whether growth is balanced-it isn't-but whether the abstraction is a useful one. Fo…
Inequality and Inefficiency in Joint Projects
nA group of agents voluntarily participates in a joint project, in which efforts are not perfectly substitutable. The output is divided according to some given vector of shares. A share vector is unimprovable if no other share vector yields a higher sum of payoffs. When the elasticity of substitution across efforts is two or lower, only the perfectly equal share vector is unimprovable, and all other vectors can be improved via Lorenz domination. …
States of Spiritual Awareness by Time, Activity, and Social Interaction
We explore how people experience the sacred in their everyday lives using a recently developed research technique-smartphone-based experience sampling method (S-ESM). The primary goal of our experience-driven approach is to explore the contours and variations of spiritual awareness within people's day-to-day lives. We seek to better understand when and where spiritual awareness is likely to arise, and the contexts in which it is rare. Our smartph…
Aspirations and the Development Treadmill
I describe a positive theory of socially determined aspirations, and some implications of that theory for the study of economic inequality and social conflict. The main contribution of the theory is that it attempts to describe, in the same explanatory arc, how a change in aspirations can be inspirational in some circumstances, or a source of frustration and resentment in others. These different reactions arise from the aspirational gap: the diff…
Groups in conflict: Private and public prizes
Games of Love and Hate
A strategic situation with payoff-based externalities is one in which a player’s payoff depends on her own action and others’ payoffs. We place restrictions on the resulting interdependent utility system that generate a standard normal form, referred to as a “game of love and hate.” Our central theorem states that every equilibrium of a game of love and hate is Pareto optimal. While externalities are restricted to flow only through payoffs, there…
Why does asset inequality affect unemployment? A study of the demand composition problem
Wages and involuntary unemployment in the slack season of a village economy
Upward Mobility in Developing Countries
This article provides an overview of the literature on mobility in developing countries.Explicit distinctions are drawn between directional and non-directional measures, absolute and relative measures, and combinations thereof.We note that the scarcity of panel data has hindered the measurement of mobility for many countries.We pay particular attention to the recent development of panel-free mobility measures, which allows us to measure upward mo…
Information and Enforcement in Informal Credit Markets
We study loan enforcement in informal credit markets with multiple lenders but no sharing of credit histories, and derive the dynamics of loan size and interest rates for relational lending. In the presence of a sufficient fraction of ‘natural defaulters’, the rest of the market can be incentivized against default by micro-rationing—sharper credit limits and possibly higher interest rates that serve as gateways into new borrowing relationships. W…
Class Inequality and Adult Attainment Projects among Middle-Aged Men in the United States, 1980-2010
Jeremy Pais, D. Matthew Ray Sociological Science, April 29, 2015 DOI 10.15195/v2.a11 Abstract Adult attainment projects (AAP) consist of a series of traditional adult statuses: labor force participation, residential independence, marriage, parenthood, and homeownership
Bargaining power and enforcement in credit markets
Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Theory
Journal Article Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Theory Get access Partha Dasgupta, Partha Dasgupta University of Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Debraj Ray Debraj Ray Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, and Stanford University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 96, Issue 384, 1 December 1986, Pages 1…
Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Policy
This paper explores the policy implications that are obtained once it is recognized that at low nutrition intakes a person's productivity is an increasing function of intake. In the context of a fully general equilibrium model it is shown that if aggregate assets in an economy are neither large nor small, certain patterns of Lorenz improving asset redistributions (or nutrition transfers) increase aggregate output and reduce the volume of involunt…
Contracts With Eviction in Infinitely Repeated Principal–Agent Relationships
In this chapter, the authors use a model of an infinitely repeated principal‐agent relationship where they explore the conditions under which labour contracts with threats of sacking or contract termination will be equilibrium outcomes.
Interlinkages and the Pattern of Competition
In this chapter, the authors make explicit the assumptions required for the frequent presumption of an ‘interlocker's edge’; and, given one or more of these assumptions, try to find out if the theory of interlinking predicts certain patterns of competition between lenders.
Why does asset inequality affect unemployment? A study of the demand composition problem
Wages and involuntary unemployment in the slack season of a village economy
On the Measurement of Polarization
Suppose that the authors are interested in the distribution of a set of characteristics over a population. They study a precise sense in which this distribution can be said to be polarized and provide a theory of measurement. Polarization, as conceptualized here, is closely related to the generation of social tensions, to the possibilities of revolution and revolt, and to the existence of social unrest in general. The authors take special care to…
Labor tying
We study labor-tying in a competitive agricultural economy. The co-existence of seasonal fluctuations in income and imperfect credit markets suggests that tied contracts should dominate casual labor markets. However, empirical observation from India suggests that this is far from being the case, and indeed, that there is a declining trend in labor tying. We consider a model that permits deviations ex-post from mutually agreed implicit contracts. …
Development Economics
Conflict and Distribution
Pyrethroid Insecticides: Mechanisms of Toxicity, Systemic Poisoning Syndromes, Paresthesia, and Therapy
Inequality, Control Rights, and Rent Seeking: Sugar Cooperatives in Maharashtra
This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights wielded by wealthier members. Transfers of rents to the latter are achieved by depressing prices paid for inputs supplied by members and diverting resulting …
Coalitional Power and Public Goods
We study the provision of public goods when all agents have complete information and can write binding agreements. This framework is in deliberate contrast to a traditional view of the free-rider problem based on hidden information or voluntary provision. We focus on coalition formation as a potential source of inefficiency. To this end, we develop a notion of an equilibrium coalition structure, based on the assumption that each coalition that fo…
Collective Action and the Group Size Paradox
According to the Olson paradox, larger groups may be less successful than smaller groups in furthering their interests. We address the issue in a model with three distinctive features: explicit intergroup interaction, collective prizes with a varying mix of public and private characteristics, and nonlinear lobbying costs. The interplay of these features leads to new results. When the cost of lobbying has the elasticity of a quadratic function, or…
Polarization: Concepts, Measurement, Estimation
We develop the measurement theory of polarization for the case in which income distributions can be described using density functions. The main theorem uniquely characterizes a class of polarization measures that fits into what we call the “identity-alienation” framework, and simultanously satisfies a set of axioms. Second, we provide sample estimators of population polarization indices that can be used to compare polarization across time or enti…
Informal Insurance in Social Networks
Inhibition of Amazon Deforestation and Fire by Parks and Indigenous Lands
Conservation scientists generally agree that many types of protected areas will be needed to protect tropical forests. But little is known of the comparative performance of inhabited and uninhabited reserves in slowing the most extreme form of forest disturbance: conversion to agriculture. We used satellite‐based maps of land cover and fire occurrence in the Brazilian Amazon to compare the performance of large (>10,000 ha) uninhabited (parks) and…
Aspirations, Poverty, and Economic Change
This essay discusses a particular aspect of poverty: its close and brutal association with a failure of aspirations. This is not an assertion about individuals who are poor; it is a statement about the condition of poverty itself. Poverty stifles dreams, or at least the process of attaining dreams. Thus, poverty and the failure of aspirations may be reciprocally linked in a self-sustaining trap. This essay seeks to draw out various aspects of thi…
An Extension of a Measure of Polarization, with an application to the income distribution of five OECD countries
Bargaining power and enforcement in credit markets
Inequality and Inefficiency in Joint Projects
nA group of agents voluntarily participates in a joint project, in which efforts are not perfectly substitutable. The output is divided according to some given vector of shares. A share vector is unimprovable if no other share vector yields a higher sum of payoffs. When the elasticity of substitution across efforts is two or lower, only the perfectly equal share vector is unimprovable, and all other vectors can be improved via Lorenz domination. …
On the Salience of Ethnic Conflict
A classical theme in social analysis views economic class divisions as the main cause of social conflict. Yet many, if not most of the conflicts we observe today appear to be ethnic in nature. It appears that the "vertical" nature of class divisions is often dominated by the "horizontal" antagonisms across groups delineated by noneconomic markers. This paper highlights the perverse synergy of economic inequality within ethnic groups, and its role…
Informal insurance in social networks
Polarization, Fractionalization and Conflict
This article provides a theoretical framework that distinguishes between the occurrence of conflict and its severity, and clarifies the role of polarization and fractionalization in each of these cases. The analysis helps in ordering the various definitions, and in providing explanations for the empirical observations on the relationship between conflict, on the one hand, and polarization or fractionalization, on the other. The behaviour of playe…
Missing Women: Age and Disease
Relative to developed countries and some parts of the developing world, most notably sub-Saharan Africa, there are far fewer women than men in India and China. It has been argued that as many as a 100 million women could be missing. The possibility of gender bias at birth and the mistreatment of young girls are widely regarded as key explanations. We provide a decomposition of these missing women by age and cause of death. While we do not dispute…
Economics (30 works) · Political science (18 works) · Mathematics (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Microeconomics (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Economic theories and models (11 works) · Inequality (11 works) · Mathematical economics (10 works)