What determines the dynamic patterns of local public investment in authoritarian countries? We analyze a unique dataset that matches public-private partnership (PPP) projects with Chinese mayors who served from 2010 to 2017, and document a robust tenure effect in public investment. Mayors...

We define matroid search problems, in which a decision maker (DM) searches for a set of objects where the set of objects and the collection of admissible sets of objects form a matroid. The DM decides whether to inspect each object to learn its value at some cost or to stop searching. We...