countries where policies became more conducive to economic activity between May and September 2020, employment among those who suffered larger initial shocks – women, non-college-educated, and urban workers – did not recover enough to close the gaps caused by initial disparities in losses. There are indications that self-employment, which is often lower-quality employment in developing countries, is accounting for a high share of the employment that is coming back (Narayan et al., 2022).

More detailed evidence on labor market dynamics available for a few countries indicates continued signs of distress in nonfarm labor markets even as economies recover, but with important differences across countries. For example, in South Africa, where employment rates were already low before the pandemic, Covid-19 led to a further decline of 13.6 percent in overall employment followed by a slow rebound whereby just 40 percent of the jobs lost were recovered by the end of 2020. Employment losses were four times as large among the bottom quintile of workers than among the top quintile, and strongly concentrated among young workers, those with lower skills or education, people of color, and those in the informal sector or in small firms. These gaps remained largely unchanged even as jobs started coming back (World Bank, 2021 _b_ ).

Evidence from Nigeria suggests that labor market impacts of the pandemic can persist even as aggregate employment numbers recover. After a sharp fall during the initial Covid-19 lockdown in the share of the Nigerian population who were working, employment recovered to exceed pre-pandemic levels by August 2020. Most of the increase was among women and the poor, in a pattern that is consistent with an “added worker effect” whereby households increase their overall labor-market participation in order to cope with economic shocks. Many Nigerians have shifted to retail and trade jobs in nonfarm household enterprises, most of which are lower productivity jobs that do not yield secure earnings (Lain et al., 2021). Vietnam offers another example of a country where signs of weaknesses have persisted amid a robust recovery in aggregate employment. High initial losses in jobs, hours worked and wages – and large gaps by gender, skill level and sector of workers – largely dissipated by the fourth quarter of 2020. However, the highest rate of job growth was occurring in more precarious forms of off-farm selfemployment rather than in wage work (World Bank, 2021 _a_ ). Job quality, as measured by the probability of having employment with a labor contract, is estimated to have declined as a result of the pandemic in second and third quarters of 2020 (Dang and Nguyen, 2020).

Our paper adds to this body of evidence by deepening the understanding of the shortterm as well as longer-term impacts of the shock, such as on labor market outcomes for youth, for a developing economy. Access to several rounds of panel data with detailed information on labor market outcomes and individual characteristics, spanning several years before and during the pandemic, offers us the unique opportunity to explore causal impacts of the shock on labor market dynamics, after accounting for the effects of confounding factors like seasonality, time trends and worker characteristics to a reasonable 4