We use five different metrics of occupational vulnerability and risk throughout this paper. The first metric categorizes whether jobs are or are not _essential_ (i.e., whether the jobs are exempt from the mobility restrictions and lockdowns imposed by governments to limit the spread of the pandemic). The second metric assesses whether jobs are or are not _amenable to work-from-home arrangements_ , which proved to be crucial when mobility restrictions were in place. The third measure is a combination of the previous two, and it serves as a proxy for the overall _vulnerability to income risks_ for a given job as measured from the labor-supply side. The fourth metric focuses on the extent to which a given job involves _intensive face-to-face interactions_ and, thus, results in more exposure to COVID-19 health risks. Finally, the fifth metric is based on _exposure to demand shocks_ ; it measures how much consumption of goods and services produced by that sector are likely to be affected by COVID-19.

# **Non-essential Jobs**

When categorizing jobs as non-essential, we start with Fasani and Mazza (2020a), who use the European Commission’s guidelines concerning the exercise of the free movement of workers during the COVID-19 outbreak<sup>4</sup> and then, supplement it with the Dutch government’s definition of “key workers.” After the onset of the pandemic, many governments created lists of occupations that were considered essential and thus were exempt from mobility restrictions and closures that were imposed during lockdowns. While the criteria for essential occupations vary from country to country, there is significant overlap. Every list, for example, includes core sectors that deliver critical healthcare (doctors, nurses and other medical professionals) and those that provide basic goods and services (food delivery, utilities, transport, security, ICT, and research and science). Lockdowns were initially imposed, progressively lifted during the summer of 2020, and then reintroduced by some governments over the course of the pandemic; thus, these restrictions had significant consequences on the ability to go to work. Based on these criteria, we identify essential workers at the three-digit ISCO-08 classification codes (which includes 182 occupations).

# **“Non-teleworkable” Jobs**

The second measure we use is related to the degree to which the tasks of a given occupation can be performed from home. Recent literature on the impact of COVID-19 on labor markets highlights the feasibility of home-based work (telework) as the key to overcome governments’ mobility restrictions and associated income/unemployment risks, and as a way to limit exposure to COVID-19 (Dingel and Neiman, 2020; Garrote Sanchez et al., 2020). In constructing our measure of the “teleworkability” of a job, we follow Dingel and Neiman (2020), who calculate the amenability of different occupations for telework in the United States by using surveys from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) on work context and generalized work activities. Jobs that are not considered to be amenable to telework arrangements are defined to include those with the following attributes: requiring workers to spend most time outdoors; requiring workers to

> 4 <u>https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52020XC0330(03)</u>

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