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The task specialization literature suggests that migrant workers concentrate on physically intensive occupations, pushing natives towards less‐risky jobs. What is the effect of immigration on the severity of work‐related injuries? By matching administrative data on work‐related injuries and residence registries in Italy, this paper shows that migrant inflows lead to a reduction of physical impairment and injury‐related paid sick leave for native workers, independently from occupation and sector transitions. The effect is largest in manufacturing and construction and among the eldest employees. The analysis exploits spatial and temporal variation in foreign‐born residents' province shares and an instrumental variable strategy based on historical co‐national local settlements. To rationalize the underlying mechanism, we show that migrant workers sort into risky occupations and we study workforce composition effects. We rule out that the effect is due to higher unemployment among natives with lower education, more exposed to injury risks, or to native workers' local migration. Longitudinal worker‐level data from the Labor Force Survey show that native workers' transitions between sectors and occupations in response to immigration are not significant. Hence, our results suggest that the reduction in injury severity may result from a reallocation of riskier tasks from native workers, especially of older ages, to migrant workers, even when occupational transitions do not occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between the spatial distribution of excess deaths and the presence of care home facilities during the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. Using registry-based mortality data for Lombardy, one of the areas most severely hit by the pandemic we show that the presence of a care home in a municipality is associated with significantly higher excess death rates in the population. This effect appears to be driven by excess mortality in the elderly population of 70 years old and older. Our results are robust to controlling for the number of residents in each care home, suggesting that the presence of such facilities may have acted as one of factors contributing to the diffusion of COVID-19 at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]