Viscusi, 2010; Dávila, Mora and González 2011; <mark>Zavodny, 2015), but also in Spain (D</mark> íaz-Serrano, 2010; Solé, Díaz-Serrano and Rodríguez, 2010), Germany (Giuntella et al., 2015), Canada (Premji et al., 2010; Smith, Kosny and Mustard, 2009) and Australia (Corvalan, Driscoll and Harrison, 1994).<sup>2</sup> The economics literature has shown that immigrant workers are concentrated in occupations that are more sensitive to business cycle fluctuations, exposing them to economic downturns and shocks (Dustmann, Glitz and Vogel, 2010; Orrenius and Zavodny, 2010). In this paper, we show that the greater exposure of immigrant workers to employment-related risks also manifested itself in the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we provide descriptive evidence of the drivers behind this greater risk exposure.<sup>3</sup> The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes our measurements of occupational vulnerability to COVID-19. Section 3 describes the datasets used in the paper. Section 4 provides descriptive statistics on occupational exposure to COVID-19 in the EU member countries. Section 5 discusses the empirical strategy. Section 6 explores the main contributors of the greater occupational exposure of immigrant workers to the COVID-19 shock. It investigates whether systematic differences in observable characteristics between native and migrant workers can explain differences in exposure, and it explores additional factors, such as the effects of networks and the imperfect transferability of skills. Section 7 examines actual job losses in the first year of the pandemic and their correlates by migrant status, using recent data from 2020. Section 8 concludes.

# 2. Measurement of Occupational Exposure to COVID-19

## 2.1 Different Measures of Risk Exposure

Risk exposure is an ex-ante measure; it needs to be assessed _before_ the harmful events take place and people react to them. Otherwise, people’s endogenous responses to the events and resulting changes in their behavior will confound attempts to measure the risk exposure. Therefore, we use information on workers’ occupations and labor market outcomes _prior_ to the emergence of the pandemic to measure their economic risk exposure and health vulnerability to COVID-19. This is also the general approach adopted in the rapidly expanding literature (see Dingel and Neiman, 2020; Garrote Sanchez et. al. 2020; Fasani and Mazza, 2020a; Fasani and Mazza, 2020b).

> 2 Orrenius and Zavodny (2013) also summarize the literature on the higher concentration of immigrant workers in risky occupations.

> 3 Limited host country language proficiency has been shown to be associated with higher-risk occupations in the United States (Orrenius and Zavodny, 2009; Marvasti, 2010; Dávila, Mora and González, 2011) and Australia (Corvalan, Driscoll and Harrison, 1994). A negative relationship between occupational risk and the number of years since migration in Taiwan, China (Wu et al., 1997) and the United States (Hao, 2008); this relationship could be due in part to increased proficiency in the host country language over time. It has also been argued that immigrant workers may have different risk preferences than natives; by virtue of selection, immigrants may be less risk averse, as suggested by a willingness to move overseas (Bonin et al., 2006; 2009).

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