implications of India’s vaccination campaign on individual employment outcomes. Due to the limitations of the data and the scope of this paper, we do not attempt to capture the grave health impacts of the pandemic (Jha et al., 2022), which are likely to have affected the labor market.<sup>2</sup> For the panel data analysis, we follow two fixed cohorts from the CPHS data – a Covid-affected cohort and a pre-Covid cohort for comparison – over a span of 12-16 months. Keeping each self-contained cohort fixed allows us to track the same individuals at different points in time. Further, the pre-Covid cohort acts as a plausible counterfactual for the Covid-cohort so that we have a baseline reference for “normal” labor market dynamics. The Covid-cohort consists of individuals interviewed between November 2019 and February 2020, right before the pandemic, and we track their outcomes every 4 months until March–June 2021. The pre-Covid cohort consists of individuals interviewed either between November 2017 and February 2018 or November 2018 and February 2019 as baseline, and then followed for 12-16 months. The outcomes of these two cohorts are then compared with reference to their own baselines using a differencein-difference regression framework, to assess the impact of the pandemic on labor market dynamics. We further examine whether individual circumstances like education and location mitigated the impacts of pandemic-related labor shocks.

Unemployment peaked at an unprecedented 24.3 percent in April 2020 and recovered quickly to 7.3 percent by July 2020. It rose again in May 2021 to 11.4 percent during India’s devastating second wave of Covid but came back to around 7 percent between July and December 2021. The quick recoveries in unemployment however mask an overall decline in labor force participation. Moreover, while Covid-19 was an economy-wide shock, women, youth, and historically disadvantaged castes experienced relatively more adverse effects, partly due to the vulnerable and informal nature of their pre-pandemic occupations. Covid-19 has induced further shifts into insecure forms of employment. In the immediate aftermath of the national lockdown, the Covid-cohort who were employed at baseline were more likely to shift into self-employment from casual-wage and salaried work by 3.6 percentage points relative to the pre-Covid cohort. In the longer run (16 months after baseline), these workers were 3.9 percentage points more likely to be in casual wage work, the most vulnerable form of employment. Transitions into more insecure jobs were also accompanied by downward transitions into lower paying jobs even among salaried workers. Salaried workers in the Covid-cohort shifted into jobs earning a median income of INR 250 less per month than the pre-Covid cohort up to 16 months after the pandemic.

We also find significant transitions from industry into agriculture for the Covid-cohort 4 months after baseline relative to the pre-Covid cohorts. However, the differences between the two cohorts become insignificant when we follow them 16 months afterwards,

> 2Refer to Malani and Ramachandran (2021) for an attempt at measuring excess mortality during the pandemic using CPHS data.

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