Italian Workers at Risk During the COVID-19 Epidemic
By Teresa Barbieri, G. Basso, Sergio Scicchitano. Italian Economic Journal, 2020
170 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We analyze the task-content of occupations operating in about 600 sectors of the economy with a focus on the dimensions that expose workers to contagion risks during the COVID-19 epidemic. We do so in the Italian context, leveraging extremely detailed and granular information from ICP, the Italian equivalent of O*Net (the survey that describes the task content of US occupations). We find that several sectors need physical proximity to operate, mainly in services and retail trade. Workers at risk of complications from COVID-19 (mainly males above the age of 50) are concentrated in sectors characterized by little physical proximity or where working from home is feasible. We then study the sectoral lockdowns put in place by the Italian Government in March 2020. We find that governmental restrictions hit the sectors where the risk of contagion in the workplace was more widespread: the effect is stronger for proximity to the public than that with co-workers. The share of workers who have the possibility to work from home is higher in sectors that were not forced to close. The evidence we provide is useful to identify which activities pose larger risks for contagion among workers in the workplace and where to reinforce safety measures.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Modeling and Simulation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3ec010aa800c70352edf88f328322d40f46c527
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Citations in the corpus
- Misinformation sharing and social media fatigue during COVID-19: An affordance and cognitive load perspective (2020, background): “The COVID-19 pandemic forced people off their routines to adopt health measures such as social isolation (Laato et al., 2020b) and in many cases, remote working (Barbieri et al., 2020).”
- Women’s and men’s work, housework and childcare, before and during COVID-19 (2020, background): “…at least one metre between individuals.1 While these measures have largely stemmed the spread of the virus, they have also had a huge impact on male and female labour market participation (see Barbieri et al. 2020; Casarico and Lattanzio 2020; Centra et al. 2020) and on inequality (Galasso 2020).”