This paper deals with a classic development question: how can the process of economic development - transition from stagnation in a traditional technology to industrialization and prosperity with a modern technology - be accelerated? Lewis (1954) and Rostow (1956) argue that the pace of...

We study the optimal auditing of a taxpayer’s income in a dynamic principal-agent model of hidden income. Taxpayers in our model initially have low income and stochastically transit to high income that is an absorbing state. A low-income taxpayer who transits to high income can underreport his...

We study infant industry protection using a dynamic model in which the industry's cost is initially higher than that of foreign competitors. The industry can stochastically lower its cost via learning by doing. Whether the industry has transitioned to low cost is private information. We use a...