Debraj Ray (economist)

Debraj Ray (born 3 September 1957) is an Indian-American economist, who is currently teaching and working at New York University. His research interests focus on development economics and game theory. Ray served as Co-editor of the ''American Economic Review'' between 2012 and 2020.

Ray is Julius Silver Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science, New York University, since 2003, and Professor of Economics at New York University since 1999. He is also a Part-Time Professor at the University of Warwick. He is a Research Affiliate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a council member of the Game Theory Society, and a board member of Theoretical Research in Development Economics
ThReD
. He served as a board member at the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development
BREAD
, since its inception till 2023.

Education

Debraj Ray graduated from the University of Calcutta, where he earned a B.A. in economics in 1977. After that, Ray obtained a M.A. (1981) and a Ph.D. (1983) both from Cornell University, where his doctoral supervisor wa
Mukul Majumdar
The title of his dissertation is Essays in Intertemporal Economics.

Academic career

Prior to joining NYU, Ray held academic positions at Stanford University, the Indian Statistical Institute, and at Boston University, where he was Director of the Institute for Economic Development. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, MIT, the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the People's University of China in Beijing, the London School of Economics, Columbia University, the Instituto de Análisis Económico in Barcelona and the University of Oslo.

Notable contributions by Ray include:

* a concept of egalitarianism under participation constraints
Dutta and Ray 1989
;
* a theory of renegotiation in dynamic games
Bernheim and Ray 1989Ray 1994
;
* a theory of poverty traps based on undernutrition, and later related work on persistent inequality
Dasgupta and Ray 1986Dasgupta and Ray 1987Baland and Ray 1991Mookherjee and Ray 2003
;
* the development of a concept of polarization, and its connections to social conflict
Esteban and Ray 1994Duclos, Esteban and Ray 2004Esteban and Ray 2011
;
* a theory of coalition formation
Ray and Vohra 1997Ray and Vohra 1999Ray 2008
;
* a theory of socially determined aspirations
Ray 2006Genicot and Ray 2017
;
* a leading textbook in Development Economics
Ray 1998
.

Professional affiliations and awards

Ray is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, a Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal, and a recipient of the Outstanding Young Scientists Award in mathematics from the Indian National Science Academy. He was awarded a ''Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa'' from the University of Oslo in 2011.

Apart from three terms as Co-editor of the ''American Economic Review'',See https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/aer/about-aer/editors Ray has served on the editorial board of ''Econometrica'', the ''Journal of Economic Theory'', the ''Journal of Development Economics'', the ''Journal of Economic Growth'', the ''Japanese Economic Review'', ''Games and Economic Behavior'', ''American Economic Journal Microeconomics''. He has served as a Foreign Editor of the ''Review of Economic Studies'', and as Co-editor of the ''Econometric Society'' journal, ''Theoretical Economics''.

Among Ray's many public lectures are the 201
Sir Richard Stone Annual Lecture
at the University of Cambridge, th
2016 Laffont Lecture of the Econometric Society
(Geneva), the 2017 Richard Ely Distinguished Lectures at Johns Hopkins University, the 202

at the University of Oslo, and the inaugura
Ashok Kotwal Memorial Lecture
( Ideas for India, New Delhi, 2022).

Ray has received many awards for his teaching and research from different institutions around the world. Among them are:
* Mahalanobis Memorial Medal of the Indian Econometric Society, 1989
* Fellow of the Econometric Society, 1993
* Gittner Teaching Award from Boston University, 1996
* Guggenheim Fellow, 1997
* Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University, 1985
* Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2016
* ''Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa'' from University of Oslo, 2011
* Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, 2011
* Golden Dozen Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching from New York University, 2017

Bibliography

Books

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Selected Journal Articles

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Notes

External links

Debraj Ray's homepage at New York University
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Ray, Debraj
1957 births
University of Calcutta alumni
Cornell University alumni
Harvard University staff
Indian development economists
Game theorists
Fellows of the Econometric Society
20th-century Indian economists
21st-century American economists
Living people
New York University faculty
American academics of Indian descent
21st-century Indian economists
Scientists from Kolkata
Scholars from Kolkata
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Silver professors
American people of Bengali descent
Bengali people