in the short-term. The suspension rate increased sharply from 25 percent in 2019 to over 40 percent in 2020. The large difference between exit and suspension rates warrants the need to empirically explore the causal impact of the pandemic and government lockdowns separately on permanent closures and temporary suspensions among HBs. We do so in the next section.

Table A.1 provides detailed summary statistics of the main HBTC analysis sample (commune-month level) (Panel A). There were, on average, 6.7 temporary business suspension filings and 0.5 permanent closure filings in a commune per month during January 2018-January 2020 (pre-COVID-19 period). For the statistics related to suspension filings, note that here we count all filings observed in the data, which captures both singular and multiple filings per firm-year, instead of the annual aggregation of the number of firms filed for suspension at least once a year reported in Table 1. By extension, the average dormancy duration of firms that filed for suspension was 2.8 months in 2018 and 2.5 months in 2019, respectively. Compared with the average number of regular annual filings per commune of 92.5 in January 2019 (s.d. is 169.45), the business suspension rate equates over 7 percent of all HBs each month, while the closure rate is over half a percent, as confirmed in Table 1. There are strong heterogeneities in both business closure and suspension rates across sectors and firm size. On average, HBs exiting from the wholesale and retails industry accounts for more than half of the total business suspension and closure filings. The data also suggest a decline in the suspension rate as operating revenue grows (the smallest firms by revenue are most likely to file for business suspension). But the largest firms by the revenue quartile (above 75th percentile) are the most likely to file for business closure.

# **2.3 The Labor Force Survey**

The Labor Force Survey (LFS) is a nationally representative survey that is conducted on a quarterly basis by the General Statistical Office of Vietnam. The survey collects detailed employment information on a representative sample of workers in the country. In this paper, we utilize monthly data collected from three LFS surveys, covering the period between January 2018 and September 2020. Our sample is truncated to include only working-age individuals (15 years or older), who were identified as either being self-employed or working in a household business.<sup>16</sup> For abbreviation, we refer to this group uniformly as household business workers, or “HB workers”. We focus on two indicators that capture the intensive margins of COVID-19 impact: worker’s reported working hours during the week prior to the survey, and worker’s reported income during the month prior to the survey. To correct for idiosyncratic interference and measurement biases, we exclude individuals who reported to have reduced workload due to sickness, natural disaster, or holidays. Our analysis sample includes 419,323 individuals interviewed in 2018, 2019 and the first three quarters in 2020.

> 16“Self-employment” and “working in a household business” belongs to occupational categories 2 and 3 in the LFS.

6