We revisit the role of human capital and skill-biased technology in explaining the cross-country variation in GDP per worker. We propose a general-equilibrium accounting model in which workers of different human-capital groups (education and age) sort across broad occupational categories. The occupational assignment is determined by the comparative advantage of workers as well as productivity and distortion parameters that are specific to each human capital and occupation pair. We map the model to a harmonized micro dataset of 43 countries spanning the entire development spectrum that allows us to measure wages by human capital and occupation. The calibration reveals that cross-country productivity gaps are increasing in the complexity of the occupation. Also, conditional on occupation, the cross-country productivity gaps vary more strongly for low-skill than high-skill workers. The process of development is hence biased toward white-collar occupations but not biased toward higher-skilled workers. We then use the model to perform several counterfactuals. We find that the composition of human capital explains 14% of the non-agricultural GDP per worker gap between the richest and poorest countries. Occupational distortions are more pronounced in poor countries, but have a minor quantitative effect on aggregate output.

We exploit the quasi-random allocation of asylum seekers across Swiss cantons and the high frequency of national referenda to identify the causal effect of immigration on political outcomes in receiving countries. We find that the arrival of asylum seekers causes voters to increase their support for right-wing and conservative policies. However, this effect is driven by episodes of unusually high inflows of asylum seekers. Moreover, we find that for votes on immigration and refugee policy, the arrival of more asylum seekers shifts voters towards policies endorsed by conservative and centre-right parties but not towards positions backed by the rightmost anti-immigration party. In contrast, the shift towards the rightmost stances is sizeable in votes related to the welfare state, international integration, and the rights of minorities.