Across countries, women and men allocate time differently between market work, domestic services, and care work. In this paper, we document the gender division of work, drawing on a new harmonized data set that provides us with high-quality time use data for 50 countries spanning the global income distribution. A striking feature of the data is the wide dispersion across countries at similar income levels. We use these data to motivate a macroeconomic model of household time use in which country-level allocations are shaped by wages and a set of “wedges” that resemble productivity, preferences, and disutilities. Taking the model to country-level observations, we find that a wedge related to the disutility of market work for women plays a crucial role in generating the observed dispersion of outcomes, particularly for middle-income countries. Variation in the division of non-market work is principally shaped by a wedge indicating greater disutility for men, which is especially large in some low- and middle-income countries.

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 harmonize individual-level data on labor supply for 54 countries. We use these data to document how firm size and the skill intensity of employment by firm size vary across countries. First, we document that the share of employment in large firms in high-income countries is more than three times larger than in low-income countries. Second, we show that across countries, employees of large firms are more skilled than those of small firms. Third, lower skill endowments in low-income countries affect employment in firms of different sizes asymmetrically: the skill intensity of employment is much lower in small firms in poor compared to large countries but only slightly lower in large firms. This evidence suggests that large firms rely particularly strongly on employing high-skill workers, so that the low-skill endowment of low-income countries limits the size of firms in these countries.

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.

We document gendered patterns of labor provision in relation to structural transformation, drawing on a harmonized micro dataset that covers 105 countries at all levels of income. We find that both marital status and location mediate labor force participation, although the relationships differ for men and women and for countries at different levels of per capita income. For both men and women, the movement out of agriculture in the course of economic growth is a widely documented pattern. What is perhaps less recognized is the concentration of women in high-income countries into paid work in non-market services (e.g., government sector jobs and work with non-governmental organizations), which are often those provided through the public sector. The growth in women’s labor force participation thus tracks closely with the size of the public sector. Finally, using a harmonized time-use data set, we find that the ratio of home work to market work is similar for women across the range of countries. Within countries, however, women working in agriculture consistently also have a high ratio of home-to-market work compared to women engaged in market work in other sectors. For men, the ratio of homework to market work rises with income levels, but across the income distribution, men devote a smaller share of total hours to home activity than women.