Professor Rayack studies economic inequality and has published on distributional impacts of recessions, wage cyclicality, interactions between spousal earnings, and declining participation in the workforce.                                                                     

Professor Rayack began her professional career in economics at the U.S. House Budget Committee in Washington, D.C., where she conducted simulations of macroeconomic policy for the Committee's chief economist using the macro-econometric models created by Data Resources Inc., Wharton, and Chase Econometrics.  While earning her Ph. D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she worked at the Institute for Research on Poverty studying Section 8 low-income housing assistance.  She has been a visiting fellow and visiting professor at Yale University's economics department, and a visiting lecturer in macroeconomics at Yale's School of Organization and Management (SOM).  Since 1983, she has been a member of Wesleyan's economics department.  There, her courses include Economics of Wealth and Poverty; Comparative Economics of Child and Family Policy; Race and Ethnicity in the Labor Market; Schooling and Scarcity; Intermediate Macroeconomics; Economics of Welfare Reform; Quantitative Methods in Economics; Public Finance; and Low-wage Labor Markets: a Data-Driven Exploration.  She also teaches in Wesleyan's College of Social Studies (CSS), offering a sophomore seminar, Topics in the History of Economic Thought, and a junior seminar, Inequality of Wealth in a Global Context.