PONE-D-22-08253Informal Sector Employment and the Health Outcomes of Older Workers in IndiaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Chowdhury,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The referees and I see value in this paper, given the novelty that it brings to the literature on how working after retirement can affect individual health, which, and I do agree with the referees on this point, is a very interesting and important topic.  Given the clear expertise of the referees, I defer to their comments and will ask you to simply respond to them. However, my view is that the main areas of concerns, which you would do well to address in rewriting the paper, are as follows:

1. I agree with the reviewers that the main drawback of the current version of the paper it is that your empirical strategy does not take into account self-selection of individuals. Even though you are looking for associations and not to causal relationships - and this should be made clear in the paper and the language used should be adapted accordingly- I believe that the issues raised by the referees, i.e. self-selection and reverse causality- should be discussed, and documented as much as possible together with potential biases suffered by your coefficients, as suggested by reviewer 2. In particular, I agree with reviewer 1 that control functions could provide a viable and helpful solutions to control for self-selection and should be used in the baseline estimates. These estimates could be added as a robustness exercise should it turn out that the estimates do not change when controlling for self-selection. For more details, please refer to the comments of the Reviewers reported below.
2. I believe that controlling for initial conditions in health, as suggested by reviewer 1, will provide another useful robustness exercise. You should discuss the problems your identification strategy suffers due to the lack of longitudinal data, and provide evidence of how robust are your results to the inclusion of initial conditions.
3. Finally, separate estimates by gender will effectively acknowledge differences existing in the selection process related to gender and clustering will provide more reliable standard errors, as suggested by reviewer 2.

Beyond the above highlighted points, as I noted previously the referee reports are all of high quality, so please make sure to respond directly to all the comments.

Congratulations on the work so far; I look forward to reading the revision.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 30 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Simona Lorena Comi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf  and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability.

Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized.

Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access.

We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Review of the paper “Informal Sector Employment and the Health Outcomes of Older Workers in India.”

General Comment

The paper focuses on an important research question: how does working after retirement age in the formal and informal sector expose older people to health events. The topic is crucial in the context of India, where a large proportion of the population is not covered by social security and bears on a family network to live at older ages.

The paper takes advantage of the LASI survey and evaluates the association between working in the formal and informal sector after age 60 and health outcomes. The main results suggest that individuals in the informal sectors have higher chances of poor cognitive functioning, whereas working in the formal sector is associated with more chronic health conditions and functional limitations. The study calls for policy able to protect older workers by providing health healthcare benefits.

I think this paper brings a good perspective on an important policy question and takes advantage of both survey data and econometric techniques to address this question. However, the fact that these results are only an association between the field of work and health events, thus causality cannot be claimed, makes the findings relatively weak and could not provide sufficient ground for a robust empirical analysis. I leave to the editor the decision whether the paper, after major revisions, is sufficiently original to be considered for publication.

Major Points to be addressed.

As a general comment, I think the authors should address the role of selection in their analysis: those who work over the retirement age are usually either at the top or bottom of the income distribution for different reasons. In particular, those who are at the bottom of the income distribution indeed are those who need to work to make their ends meet. In this context, if the sample includes primarily individuals working in the informal/formal sector belonging to the bottom of the income distribution, I suspect the role of selection: since health status is correlated with socioeconomic conditions, you are looking at people with lower health capital and attributing to them an effect of working longer on their health status, which is instead due to an initial lower health endowment. Thus, you are looking at selected individuals who are likely to have poor health status in general.

Another important question which has not been addressed is the reverse association (given that we cannot claim causality) between the type of work and health conditions. What if individuals with cognitive deficits, limitations in functioning (and chronic diseases) are more likely to find a job in the informal (or formal) sector and work after age 60 (to make their ends meet)? Thus, if this is the case, then it could be that having pre-existing health conditions predicts the chance of working in certain types of jobs, which is associated with higher chances of having these health conditions lately.

Overall, I think that the paper should clarify from the beginning that this study looks at the association between formal/informal sectors and health outcomes, and it is not claiming causality.

Pg 5 of the manuscript: “However, no study till date, nationally or internationally, has emphasised this aspect (concerning the extent to which the health conditions are associated with the type of employment for older workers). I argue that the following reference looks at this type of association, which is not cited in the paper.

Nag, A., Vyas, H., & Nag, P. (2016). Occupational health scenario of Indian informal sector. Industrial health, 2015-0112.

Although they do not specifically focus on the older workers, their sample includes a vast population of workers. Thus, I think that this study should be acknowledged at least.

Page 6: in Figure 1, I think another critical piece of information to be taken into account is the initial health endowment: following the seminal contribution of Grossman (1972), health is part of the human capital of each individual; thus, the initial health endowment should be taken into account when evaluating the effect of the type of work on late-life health effects.

For example, the authors should consider including health as a child. To avoid the omitted variable bias problem, I advise the author to include the information about the childhood health conditions available in the LASI questionnaire on questions HT231, HT232, HT233 HT234. This information is much needed to be considered to control for the initial health endowment.

Page 7: There is a reference to the total sample of the survey, but how many individuals are aged above 60? The text-only reports those who are still in the workforce.

Section 2. (page 8) Functional Limitations: there is no reference to which ones are the 13 specific activities

Type of work section (page 9): there is no reference to the complete list of classification of occupation nor in the appendix. Al least an example should be provided to allow the reader to get a grasp of the classification.

Methods (page 7 onwards): Although this study looks at the association between type of work and health outcomes using logistic regression models, I wonder why the authors did not provide alternative models such as probabilistic or ols models. In this context, I also argue that the choice of measuring CHC as a function of the polynomial in Model-3 would suggest the need to instrument this variable. Thus, when looking at FL and PCF outcomes, including the CHC as control could be done by exploiting the Control Function approach à la Wooldridge (2015), thus instrumenting the CHC with residuals of Model-3 in Table-1.

Finally, are the results reported in Tables 4 to 6 coefficients or marginal effects? To compare results across Tables, marginal effects should be displayed to have a sense of the magnitude.

Table-2: The sample composition is not gender-balanced. This might have affected the results. I also wonder whether the place of residence, which is proportioned toward the rural area, has again some drawbacks such as self-selection of those individuals who are poorer and less educated (in line with the 78% of individuals in the sample reporting low education level).

The role of household size appears to be particularly important in Indian society. I would suggest the author show the distribution of household size greater than 4, given that it includes 61.34% of the sample.

Bivariate analysis results (page 13): I suggest adding the confidence intervals to Figure 2.

Tables from 4 (page 15): as a general comment, I wonder why doing yoga could increase the chances of CHC and how the authors explain this finding.

As a general comment, I would suggest the authors conduct sensitivity analyses by subgroups of individuals, namely by gender, geographical area, and age group 60-64 and 65+. This could confirm the robustness of the results.

Another alternative classification related to formal vs informal jobs is the separation between non-strenuous vs strenuous jobs. This could be investigated as an alternative.

Minor Points to be addressed

Page 3: When reporting “India, …., reportedly 8.6 percent (104 million) of the total population in 2011…” I think a reference should be added.

Page 6: Why there is the name of the authors reported next to reference number (7)? I think that the manuscript should show consistency with the style of referencing.

References

Nag, A., Vyas, H., & Nag, P. (2016). Occupational health scenario of Indian informal sector. Industrial health, 2015-0112.

Wooldridge (2015), Control function methods in applied econometrics, Journal of Human Resources, 50(2), 420-445.

Reviewer #2: This paper uses the baseline wave of longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI) to investigate the association between health and employment in later years, as well as the heterogeneous effect by employment type. The analytical sample contains only working populations over age 60. Overall, the paper is well written in a clear and scientific matter. Empirical results consistently show the health effect varies by employment type and specific health outcomes. Employment type significantly moderates the effect of CHC on FL, and FL on PCF.

Comments:

My major comments are on the complexity of employment in later years as established by existing research (e.g., Rietveld et al.,2014; van Zon et al.,2020). It is understandable that the cross-sectional nature of the dataset limits further exploration of any dynamic aspects of employment, also, the goal of the paper is not aimed at a causal identification. However, it could be more informative to add some relevant descriptive statistics, sensitivity checks, or comments regarding the defined employment status that might not truly reflect the general associations.

1) The observed employment type might contain some noise due to potential complex work transitions in later years such as partial retirement. Some transitions and jobs could be quite recent and temporary, especially in the informal sector, which may require additional control for working characteristics such as working years and sectors (public/private).

Without any further details, it is possible that some people are working as a recovery from an early retirement or mandatory retirement, or at a phase of bridge job. For one thing, the current employment can differ much from their main career which determinants one’s pension and other welfare schemes.

For another, the health effect of employment might be biased given potentially complex sorting into employment for older workers. For instance, if one transited from a full-time office-based job to self-employment to better manage working hours, the estimated health effect of the informal sector might vary by time. Socioeconomically advantaged individuals might extend working life as a way to continue social participation which probably exerts a positive impact on mental health and well-being, in the meanwhile, affecting physical health.

2) It would be better to add separate estimation by gender considering the gender difference in terms of both health, healthcare utilisation and employment aspects (e.g., Kandrack et al.,1991). Especially, labour force participation is more selective among females than males, and there are also great heterogeneities across occupations within formal or informal sectors. For instance, continued employment may buffer against risk factors that aggravate women’s cognitive health (Oi, Katsuya 2019).

For other minor comments:

3) It might be better to cluster standard error at a household level to account for the potential correlation among employment/retirement decisions within a household. Old couples might have a joint retirement (or working) plan.

4) The implication about the healthcare services needs could probably be better supported by adding some descriptive statistics about healthcare utilisation, and healthcare entitlements (if data permits).

5) Potential measurement error due to cognitive impairment. To what extent the estimated might be affected by the recall error in covariates such as wealth and job characteristics? Any potential screening criteria for cognitive impairment? Are surveyed people all self-interviewed or include proxy answers?

Typos:

P17: informal workers without CHC have 0.8 folds less odds

P26: those determinants which have considerable impacts

Reference:

1) Kandrack, Mary-Anne, Karen R. Grant, and Alexander Segall. "Gender differences in health related behaviour: some unanswered questions." Social science & medicine 32.5 (1991): 579-590.

2) Oi, Katsuya. "Does gender differentiate the effects of retirement on cognitive health?." Research on Aging 41.6 (2019): 575-601.

3) Rietveld, Cornelius A., Hans van Kippersluis, and A. Roy Thurik. "Self‐employment and health: Barriers or benefits?." Health economics 24.10 (2015): 1302-1313.

4) van Zon, Sander KR, et al. "Multimorbidity and the transition out of full-time paid employment: a longitudinal analysis of the health and retirement study." The Journals of Gerontology: Series B 75.3 (2020): 705-715.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PLoS report_20220530.docx

PONE-D-22-08253R1Informal Sector Employment and the Health Outcomes of Older Workers in IndiaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Chowdhury,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Thank you for submitting the revised version of your manuscript to PLOS ONE. Both reviewers and I feel that the paper is much improved. However, there are a few issues raised by the reviewers that you should address. I would like you to revise your paper, taking into account the comments of the referees (see below).

Specifically, I do agree with Reviewer 1 that self-selection into job could be an issue and should be mentioned and discussed in the paper. Furthermore, the Discussion section is not very effective and should be shortened and rewritten to better highlight your key results.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 25 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Simona Lorena Comi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I think the authors have responded satisfactorily to most of the comments from the first review round. I do however still have some small comments for some of them.

In particular, I think the role of individuals with poor health self-selecting into poorer jobs, which leads to a stronger deterioration of health should be acknowledged better than as it is now in the manuscript. Although it is unlikely that individuals self-selected themselves into the type of employment due to pre-existing health status later in life, it could be that they self-select at the beginning of their working careers and they remain in poor jobs.

It is fundamental to stress that individuals could ex ante engage in poor jobs due to their precarious health status at a young age and thus leading to late-life health decline. I think this point could be better explained in the introduction, as they explain in the report which I received.

Finally, regarding the Discussion session, I found the section very dense and I would suggest stressing the key findings of the paper as well as the take-home message, in order to provide a more synthetic interpretation.

Minor Comments

Table 2 : I wonder whether for binary covariates it would be sufficient to report only one category (for example only those who have chronic health conditions, instead of both no/yes), to make the tables more compact.

Reviewer #2: Many thanks for your efforts in the revision, and I think all my concerns have been responded or addressed properly.

For the new version, I might have two additional comments. The first is the control function approach which has changed many models. If I understand correctly, it is used as a control for partial chronic conditions that are unexplained by observables. If much of variation in chronic conditions have been explained in a separate model, the residual variable might not be a good proxy for chronic conditions.

Second, I am not sure whether I grasp the idea of combining PCF and FL as the fourth outcome variable to explore the potential interactions between PCF and FL. Indeed, in the final results, the coefficients of informal worker on PCF and FL have opposite signs, making the coefficient on PCF/PF insignificant. I am not sure about the idea here or the relevant explanation.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

PONE-D-22-08253R2Informal Sector Employment and the Health Outcomes of Older Workers in IndiaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Chowdhury,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

My apologies for the time it has taken me to get back to you despite a very timely response from the two original reviewers. Both reviewers are overall quite happy with the progress made but reviewer 1 still wants to see a few additional changes to the discussion section before recommending an unconditional acceptance. I agree with that assessment – you have responded very well to most of the issues raised and as a result, the manuscript has taken a big step toward a final publication. However, I would still ask you to address the remaining comments of reviewer 1 in a final revision of your paper.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 09 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Simona Lorena Comi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have addressed all my comments. However, I want to stress that the discussion needs some adjustments. The discussion should focus on the main findings and the paper's strength and limitations, as well as potential future research. As it is now the discussion includes also the basic scenario (which is well explained in the introduction) and the role of covariates (which I do not find essential in this section). I think the authors could improve the discussion. After that, the paper would likely be ready to be accepted for publication.

Reviewer #2: Many thanks for the updated version. All my comments have been explained in general. My small concern will still be around the justification to combine CPF and FL although they are closely and positively correlated. For me, the separate results for each as outcome variable seem to be already informative about the effect of informal sector on health outcomes. The mechanisms might be different for cognition and functional limitation.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Informal Sector Employment and the Health Outcomes of Older Workers in India

PONE-D-22-08253R3

Dear Dr. Chowdhury,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Simona Lorena Comi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have addressed my concerns regarding the discussion part and I think that the manuscript is now in good shape.

Reviewer #2: Many thanks for further explanation. According to the coefficients from previous Tables, the correlation between working sector and FL and PCF work in an opposite direction - reducing the significance level and the size of the coefficient in Table 7. The findings from separate regressions do suggest more interesting and probably complex relationship between PCF and FL, as well as working sector. As the results do not suggest causal effect, it seems that people working in an informal sector, like agriculture, are likely to have greater physical capacity, which in the meanwhile offsets some cognition declining. The results in this part might need more explanations. The results seem to suggest weaker relevance to the point as suggested by the literature, like any potential amplification of one problem to the other. Since this does not affect the main conclusion and results in general, I am fine with the current version

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********