Abstract
This paper uses a new field survey of urban India to show that employment and earnings were decimated by the lockdown resulting from the Covid-19 crisis. It examines workers’ desire for a job guarantee in this setting. Workers who had a job guarantee before the crisis were relatively shielded as they were not hit so hard in terms of the increased incidence of job loss or working zero hours and in experiencing earnings losses. A stated choice experiment reveals evidence that low-wage workers are on average willing to give up around a quarter of their daily wage for a job guarantee, with higher valuations for young and female workers. Direct survey questions corroborate the demand for an urban job guarantee, with informal, female and low-education workers being most likely to want a job guarantee, and to want it more due to the crisis. The latter is reconfirmed by looking at experimental variations in willingness to pay in the reasons why workers state they would like a job guarantee.