Dr. Achintya Ray Assistant Professor, Department of Economics & Finance Senior Research Associate, Office of Business & Economic Research College of Business, Tennessee State University   Email: aray4@tnstate.edu Phone: (615) 963 7347; FAX: (615) 963 7381

Dr. Achintya Ray has a Ph.D. and MA in Economics from Vanderbilt University, MA in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics (University of Delhi) and a B.Sc. with Honors in Economics from the University of Calcutta. Prior to joining the faculty of the College of Business, Tennessee State University, he was a Senior Research Associate (Health Outcomes Research) at the Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine. Dr. Ray also held research positions in the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, Department of Economics, and Owen Graduate School of management at Vanderbilt University and Indian Statistical Institute.

Dr. Ray is an applied microeconomist. His primary research interest lies in the fields of Health Economics, Development Economics and Industrial Organization. His research focuses on issues like technology adoption under asymmetric information, the nature of healthcare as a service, the roots of health disparity across population groups, creation of health measure that takes into account multiple dimensions of human welfare, creation of poverty measure that can simultaneously measure the efficiency of public support programs, understanding the power of education in extending dimensions of individual freedom and contributing to social good etc.

Currently, he is working on a few collaborative research projects in the general area of health inequality and the role of education in this context. That income is a good predictor of individual health is well-known. However, it has been observed that there exists significant variation in life expectancy and mortality figures between population groups even within the highly industrialized rich nations like those in the OECD. The level of income alone does not easily explain this variation. The research that he has been involved with in this line suggests that a large part of this variation could be explained by the differences in educational attainment across different population groups. Results from this line of research will help bring education at the center of health policy-making and would help us in understanding crucial complementarities that exist between different aspects of human capital (like education and health).     

A second line of his current research focuses on the process of technology adoption when different parties involved with the technology adoption process have different expectations (from the proposed adoption) and face different private costs of adoption. If costs of adoption of a new technology are asymmetrically borne by different parties involved with the process of adoption and no contract could be easily written to equalize the cost across the parties then even superior innovations may not get adopted. Dr. Ray is exploring the implication of his research in the adoption of technology in joint ventures and the problem of  designing contracts that might alleviate the problem of information asymmetry in technology adoption issues.

A third line of Dr. Ray’s research concerns the construction of index numbers that take into account information from multiple dimensions. Information aggregation from multiple dimensions has two aspects: loss of part of the information from any particular dimension and gain in information due to availability of information from multiple dimensions. An index that takes into account information available from multiple dimensions is information-wise richer than an index based on any particular dimension as long as gains due to aggregation are higher than the losses incurred in the process of aggregation. The goal of this line of research is to understand various aspects of human welfare and development by constructing appropriate measures and studying their relationships to variables of socioeconomic interest and their changes over time and space in response to policies.

Dr. Ray has made many presentations of his work around the world. Among other places, he presented his research work at Vanderbilt University, Whittier College, Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Waterloo, Indian Institute of Management, Indian Statistical Institute, and Jawaharlal Nehru University.