Inbar Amit

I am a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford and a Research Scholar at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. My research focuses on education, labor and development economics.

Here is my CV.

Working Papers

• Go Your Own Way? Peer Effects, School Choice, and Educational Inequality
  
  Abstract

  High schools have lasting academic and economic consequences for their students. I use detailed Chilean administrative data to show that interactions among primary school peers shape how students sort into high schools. I exploit the random assignment of students into oversubscribed primary schools, together with repeated data on graduates’ applications, to identify the causal impact of exposure to primary school peers on students’ choice of high school. I find that studying with a particular peer significantly increases the probability that a student applies to and attends the same high school. Peer effects interact nonlinearly with the spatial distribution of high school quality, shaping educational inequality. Embedding peer effects into a model of school choice, I show that when access to high-quality high schools is unevenly distributed across space, interactions among peers can reduce applications to high-quality schools from students in disadvantaged areas, amplifying inequality. Empirically, I find that peer effects account for one-sixth of the gap in the probability that low- and high-income students attend a high-quality high school. I show that to address these gaps, policies that expand students’ access to high- quality high schools can benefit from increasing returns to scale through spillovers within peer networks without generating negative externalities for untargeted students.

• Flexibility versus Performance: The Determinants of Labor Contracts in Nairobi, Kenya
  with Nathan Barker, Alison Andrew, Rob Garlick, Kate Orkin, and Carol Nekesa
  Abstract

  Employment in developing countries is often short and disrupted, generating costly search and limiting the potential for workers to accumulate firm-specific human capital. We study the incentives guiding firms' use of short-term relative to long-term contracts in Nairobi, Kenya, using novel survey data on firms’ hiring and contracting practices, and hypothetical vignettes measuring their beliefs and preferences. Our key finding is that the use of short-term labor is governed by a trade-off between managing demand variation versus minimizing adjustment costs and incentivizing worker performance. We first document that firms face considerable variation in demand for goods and services across time, much of which they pass on to workers through short-term contracts: higher demand variation is associated with a greater use of short-term labor. Second, we show that bringing on short-term workers involves adjustment costs: it takes time searching for, hiring, and on-boarding workers, potentially offsetting the gains from flexibility. We show both that median adjustment costs are low, making short-term contracts feasible for many hires, but that hires with greater adjustment costs are more likely to be on long-term contracts. Finally, we show that firms believe contract type incentivizes worker performance: the same worker is expected to perform better when hired on a long-term basis. We incorporate these features---variation in demand, on-boarding costs, and incentives---into a model of firm hiring, through which to interpret contract choice and turnover in low-income countries.

Work in Progress

• Understanding Barriers to Youth Employment in Kenya

  with Nathan Barker, Alison Andrew, Rob Garlick, Kate Orkin, and Carol Nekesa Fieldwork in Progress

• Monopsony in Low-Income Labor Markets

  Funding Proposal Under Review

• Labor Market Competition and Development: Cross-Country Evidence and Implications

  Abstract

  Using a harmonized dataset of labor force and longitudinal household surveys, I document how the competitiveness of labor markets varies across countries. I find that the elasticity of the labor supply curve to a firm is, on average, three times higher in high-income countries relative to low- and middle-income countries. In addition, I find that more educated workers in poorer countries supply labor to firms more elastically, and so differences in educational composition explain around thirty percent of cross-country differences in the average elasticity. This finding is consistent with higher search frictions in poorer countries, and labor market policies and institutions that are less favourable to workers. Finally, I argue that labor market power may negatively impact efficiency in the economy by inducing labor misallocation between wage-work and self-employment.

  Draft Available Upon Request

Teaching

• Core Empirical Research Methods (Graduate)

  Course Convenor: Francis DiTraglia Years: 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 (exp.)

• Core Microeconomics (Undergraduate)

  Course Convenor(s): Sarah Clifford (2022), Alison Andrew (2025) Years: 2022, 2025