(including the UK),<sup>7</sup> (ii) high-income European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries,<sup>8</sup> (iii) the new member states of the EU (referred to as NMS13)<sup>9</sup> , (iv) non-EU European countries<sup>10</sup> , (v) Latin America, (vi) Asia, (vii) the Middle East and North Africa, (viii) Sub-Saharan Africa, and (ix) other high-income OECD countries that are not in Europe (mainly, the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand).

We have detailed information on various labor-market outcomes of the individuals in the dataset. In terms of labor market status, people are labeled as (i) out of the labor force, (ii) seeking employment, or (iii) currently employed. For the employed workers, there is detailed information on the characteristics of their jobs. These variables include the sector of activity at the one-digitdisaggregation level (using NACE classifications) and detailed occupational categories at the three-digit level (using ISCO-08 classifications). This information enables us to categorize jobs according to the degree of exposure to COVID-19.

The 2014 survey of the EU-LFS includes a special migration module that contains further information on immigrants. These variables include the reason for migration, the level of language fluency of the migrant, the main barriers to labor-market participation (legal documents, recognition of foreign qualifications, language fluency, ethnic or religious background), and the extent to which the migrant is overqualified for the job. These data allow us to better understand the skill profiles of migrants in comparison to those of native-born workers.

To assess the task content and different characteristics of occupations, we use two surveys administered by O*NET, the program sponsored by the US Department of Labor to improve the understanding of the nature of work. The O*NET database contains a vast array of standardized, occupation-specific characteristics for almost 1,000 occupations.

# 4. Exposure of Immigrant and Native-Born Workers to Pandemic-Related Risks

## **Measure 1: Non-essential Occupations**

Our first comparison between immigrants and native-born workers focuses on the share of workers in non-essential occupations to assess their relative economic exposure to measures that were put in place to contain the spread of COVID-19. We find that migrants in the EU are less likely than native-born citizens to work in occupations that are defined as non-essential. As shown in Panel A of Figure 1, 58 percent of immigrants and 63 percent of native-born workers were employed in

> 7 At the time of the EU-LFS surveys, the United Kingdom was a member of the European Union, but formally left on January 31, 2020. As such, in most of our analysis, the United Kingdom is included with the high-income EU15 countries.

> 8 The EFTA Member States are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.

> 9 These are the 13 countries that joined the EU as part of 2004 enlargement and subsequently. The group consists of Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and the Slovak Republic.

> 10 These countries are Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Republic of Moldova, Montenegro, the Russian Federation, Serbia, Turkey and Ukraine.

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