available, individuals’ safety and health concerns might be assuaged and therefore, they are more willing to supply their labor. Alternatively, vaccination can lead to increases in labor demand as the economy recovers and particularly, for those workers who are vaccinated to mitigate spread of the virus at the workplace. While it is not possible to quantitatively distinguish whether supply- or demand-side drivers are behind the findings in Table 1, the supporting evidence seems to be in favor of the latter. Firstly, labor force participation has been declining consistently and has not shown signs of an uptick since India’s vaccine campaign was launched. Unemployment, however, has recovered. This suggests that instead of additional workers joining the labor force, vaccination may have allowed existing job seekers to match with employers. Secondly, there are anecdotal reports that employers are requesting new hires to be vaccinated and are prominently displaying signs stating that all staff are vaccinated. This is corroborated by survey data when we look at the individuals who get prioritized for vaccination in households where not all, but only some eligible adults are vaccinated. In Figure 17, we see that male, employed, and prime-working age adults are more likely to get priority for being vaccinated. This may be due to costs or behavioral constraints in accessing vaccination despite it being freely provided at government health centers. The priority of ‘primeworking’ members over others in the household suggests that they have greater returns from vaccination, likely through the labor market.

# **5 Discussion**

Covid-19 was an unprecedented health crisis across the world and in India. This paper examines the impact of the crisis on labor market outcomes in India, which has mostly been in the form of various downward transitions. Individuals affected by Covid19 transitioned out of employment or the labor force altogether. People who remained employed moved into more vulnerable employment arrangements like casual-wage work or self-employment. This is also accompanied by greater volatility in the probability of positive wages and reduced earnings for the Covid cohort. The reduction in median wages holds even for salaried workers, who transitioned into lower-paying jobs. There was a short-term shift into agriculture at the expense of industry, which coincided with India’s migrant crisis. The large movement of people to rural areas was not compensated by a return to cities in the same magnitude, and in fact rates of out-migration steadily decreased since the pandemic.

Women, marginalized castes, and the youth have fared worse due to the pandemic. The former two groups faced greater likelihoods of unemployment conditional on being employed before the pandemic, partly due to characteristics of their pre-pandemic jobs. Youths (aged 15-24 years) were more likely to withdraw or abstain from entering the labor force, and were also less likely to be enrolled in an educational institution relative to their pre-Covid counterparts. This finding is worrying because higher education helped mitigate adverse effects of the pandemic. Individuals with tertiary education retained their earnings premium vis-a-vis those with no education even after Covid-19, while lower 27