In this paper, we use administrative data from a Eurozone country characterized by a sharp pandemic crisis, a segmented labor market, and a generous coverage of furlough schemes to obtain causal estimates of the impact of the pandemic crisis on jobless claims, on job placements and on the reasons that motivated the jobless claim, during the first six months of the pandemic, i.e., between March and August 2020, and to uncover the uneven impacts of the crisis in the workforce. Covering the universe of individuals formally registered as unemployed in 278 Portuguese municipalities, we employ event study difference-in-differences and document a large causal impact on jobless claims: the year-on-year growth rates increase by 39 and 38 percentage points in June and July, respectively. New job placements drop significantly, especially in April. We also use triple difference-in-differences to show that individuals up to 34 years old and with secondary education fell more into unemployment. Female labor market prospects are worsened by the pandemic, with an additional 17.5% drop in new job placements of women compared to men. The heterogeneous effects on unemployment were accentuated in municipalities with a higher share of temporary workers.
