I'd make sure you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison. Ensure the VM for dev has the same number of vCPU's, memory, etc assigned. Then ensure that the SQL server-level settings are...

Here's a similar article by Aaron Bertrand with some good performance analysis: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertrand/archive/2012/01/26/the-fallacy-that-a-while-loop-isn-t-a-cursor.aspx