Marlon Seror

Ongoing Research

• (Forthcoming, Review of Economic Studies; Latest Version, NBER WP, Appendix), joint with , H. Xu, and .

  We study the impact of large, successful manufacturing plants on other local producers in China, focusing on "Million-Rouble Plants" built in the 1950s during a brief alliance with the U.S.S.R. The ephemeral geopolitical situation and the locations of allied and enemy airbases provide exogenous variation in plant siting. We find a boom-and-bust pattern: Counties hosting these plants were 80\% more productive than control counties in 1982 but 20\% less productive by 2010. This decline reflects the performance of local establishments, which exhibit low productivity, limited innovation, and high markup. Specialization hindered spillovers, preventing the emergence of new clusters and local entrepreneurship.

  Presented at the 2019 Conference on Urban and Regional Economics (CURE), Harvard Cities and Development Workshop (2020).

• (R&R, Review of Economic Studies; , NBER WP), joint with , , , and .

  Can efforts to eradicate inequality in wealth and education eliminate intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status? The Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution aimed to do exactly that. Using household survey data, as well as newly digitized archival records, we show that the revolutions were effective in homogenizing the population economically in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the pre-revolution generation re-emerges almost half a century after the revolutions. Individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 14 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from the rest of the population. We find evidence that human capital (such as knowledge, skills, and values) has been transmitted within the elite families, and social capital embodied in kinship networks have survived the revolutions. These channels allow the pre-revolution elite to rebound after the revolutions, and their socioeconomic status persists despite one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population.

  Presented at: NBER Economics of Mobility meeting (2020).

  Media coverage: NBER Digest, The Economist (2020), The Economist (2022), Forbes (2022), InequaliTalks podcast (2023).

• (Latest Version, CEPR WP), joint with , , and .

  In developing countries, rural workers who migrate to urban areas face large monetary and non-monetary costs, which gives them an incentive to leave family behind. This option is absent from standard equilibrium models of migration. Using Chinese data from 2000 to 2005, we develop and estimate the first quantitative spatial model in which workers can choose whether to migrate, whether to bring their family, where to go, and how to allocate their consumption across locations. We show that the ability of rural workers to become a "floating population" that consumes partly at origin through remittances was essential for Chinese economic development.

  Presented at the 2023 CURE/ERWIT conference.

• (Latest Version, WP).

  This paper exploits exogenous changes in the course of the Yellow River in China to isolate variation in the natural distribution of economic centers across space. I compute time-varying trade costs and collect original data on population and taxation from dynastic histories and local gazetteers spanning 2,000 years. This allows me to assess the effect of exogenous variation in market access on population density and resource extraction. I find that the changes in connectedness have two opposite effects. First, they induce a very large increase in the level and concentration of economic activity in the shorter run. Second, they trigger a large increase in rent capture by local elites, which severely mitigates the concentration effect in the longer run.

  Presented at the 2019 India-China Conference, Warwick.

• (, ).

  Migration increases sending households' capacity to invest but introduces additional information asymmetry between household members. In this paper, I establish a new stylized fact: Migrants systematically overestimate assets that they typically invest in and that are held by their households. This is shown using novel data with matched reports from Senegalese migrants and their own households of origin. I find empirical support for a self-selection mechanism: migrants are more likely to sort into investment, the more optimistic they are about their households' trustworthiness, and reject alternative interpretations based on behavioral biases. I finally assess the extent of missing investments: Selection out of investment is large and severely reduces the developmental impact of migration.

  An earlier version was awarded the Grand Prix (first prize) of the International Competition of Master's Degree Theses in Economics and Finance and presented at the AEA Meetings in 2015.