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.

I am on the 2026-2027 job market. You can have a look at my CV here!

Working Papers

• Preference for Peers and Educational Inequality: Evidence from School Admission Lotteries (JMP)
  
  Abstract

  I use data from Chile’s centralized school admission system to show that families prefer to enroll children in high schools together with their primary school peers. Leveraging exogenous variation generated by high school admission lotteries, I find that every primary school peer admitted to the same high school increases the probability a family accepts an offer of admission to the school by 0.2 percentage points. To study how a preference to study with peers impacts children’s schooling outcomes, I embed it in a structural model of school choice. Since primary school peers tend to live near one another, a preference to study together in high school increases the probability that families apply to nearby schools, where more primary school peers are expected to apply. For families from low-SES backgrounds, who tend to live closer to low-quality schools, this reduces the likelihood of applying to a high-quality high school. Empirically, I find that the preference to study with peers increases the socioeconomic gap in the probability of admission to a highly-rated high school by 19%, and the gap in high school value-added by 18%. To address these gaps, I show that a transport subsidy policy that expands children’s access to high-quality high schools can benefit from increasing returns to scale through spillovers within peer networks, while generating minimal negative externalities for other children.

• 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

  Fieldwork in Progress

• 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

• Core Microeconomics (Undergraduate)

  Course Convenor(s): Sarah Clifford (2022), Alison Andrew (2025, 2026) Years: 2022, 2025, 2026