Do Immigrants Push Natives towards Safer Jobs ? Exposure to COVID-19 in the European Union

Laurent Bossavie, Daniel Garrote Sanchez, Mattia Makovec and Caglar Ozden

No 9500, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper assesses the impact of immigration to Western Europe on the exposure of native-born workers to economic and health risks created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Using various measures of occupational risks, it first shows that immigrant workers, especially those coming from lower-income member countries of the European Union or from outside the European Union, are more exposed to the negative income shocks relative to the natives. The paper then examines whether immigration has an impact on the exposure of natives to COVID-19-related risks in Western Europe. A Bartik-type shift share instrument is used to control for potential unobservable factors that would lead migrants to self-select into more vulnerable occupations across regions and bias the results. The results of the instrumental variable estimates indicate that the presence of immigrant workers had a causal impact in reducing the exposure of natives to COVID-19-related economic and health risks in European regions. Estimated effects are stronger for high-skilled native workers than for low-skilled natives and for women relative to men. The paper does not find any significant effect of immigration on wages and employment, which indicates that the effects are mostly driven by a reallocation from less safe jobs to safer jobs.

Keywords: Labor Markets; Indigenous Peoples Law; Indigenous Peoples; Indigenous Communities; Health Care Services Industry; Human Migrations&Resettlements; International Migration; Migration and Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hea, nep-int, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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