Being on the Frontline? Immigrant Workers in Europe and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Francesco Fasani and Jacopo Mazza

No 15590, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We provide a first systematic assessment of the labor market impact of COVID-19 on immigrant workers in Europe. In the first year of the pandemic, we estimate that Extra EU migrants were twice as likely to have their job terminated relative to comparable natives, while for EU migrants this probability was 1.6 times larger. To understand the determinants of these large gaps, we focus on three job characteristics: essentiality, temporariness and teleworkability. After documenting differential migrant-native distribution along these three dimensions, we estimate that this pre-pandemic occupational sorting accounts for around 50% of the explained native-migrants gaps in the risk of employment termination; sorting into industries accounts for the other half. Further, we estimate a larger penalty for migrants from being employed in low-teleworkable occupations. Even within narrow occupation/industry cells, however, more than half of the migrant-native gap in job separation probability remains unexplained.

Keywords: Employment risk; Covid-19; Key occupations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J20 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15590 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Being on the Frontline? Immigrant Workers in Europe and the COVID-19 Pandemic (2023)
Working Paper: Being on the Frontline? Immigrant Workers in Europe and the COVID-19 Pandemic (2021)
Working Paper: Being on the Frontline? Immigrant Workers in Europe and the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020)
Working Paper: Being on the Frontline? Immigrant Workers in Europe and the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15590

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15590

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().