This thesis is composed of three chapters in empirical labor economics with emphasis on education and migration. The first chapter is on the link between various levels of education and aggregate income across countries. The two remaining chapters focus on the educational attainment and labor market outcomes of immigrants in France based on a recent survey. In Chapter 1, I conduct an empirical study of the impact of education on the growth and productivity of countries depending on their level of development and the quality of schooling. Specifically, my paper provides cross-country panel estimations of the returns to the stages (primary, secondary, and tertiary) of education using an aggregate production function approach. My estimates from various panel data methods point to heterogeneous impacts of schooling by levels across countries. In particular, tertiary schooling seems to have a more important effect in countries with a higher level of development and schooling quality, while primary and/or secondary schooling seems to play a more important role in relatively less developed countries with lower schooling quality. My results are ultimately related to development policies in education and human capital investment to boost productivity and growth. In Chapter 2, which is a joint work with Ana Ferrer (University of Waterloo), we provide a detailed analysis of the educational attainment and labor market performance of various sub-populations in France using a recent survey. Our results indicate that immigrants in France are less educated than the native-born population and that these differences can be tracked down to differences in socioeconomic backgrounds for most groups of immigrants. Similarly, there is a significant wage gap between immigrant and native-born workers, but this is reduced and sometimes disappears after correcting for selection into employment. In most cases the remaining differences in education and labor market outcomes seem related to the area of origin of the immigrant as well as where the education of the immigrant is obtained. In Chapter 3, using the same data, I look at the relationship between the labor market outcomes and the entry visa types of immigrants. To this end, I analyze the socioeconomic characteristics of four groups of immigrants based on their visa categories at entry: family migrants, work migrants, refugees, and students. In particular, my paper provides evidence from information on visa categories to gain further insights into the labor market analysis of immigrants. The estimation results suggest that work migrants are more likely to participate in the labor force and be employed than family migrants. However, these gaps disappear after netting out the differences in observable characteristics (except for women). In terms of wages, migrants who came to France as workers or as students earn significantly more than the family migrants. Finally, the paper finds that refugee migrants are not less successful than the family migrants in the labor markets.