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Papers written by Author(s): 'Emily Penner'

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  • Working Paper

    Peer Income Exposure Across the Income Distribution

    February 2025

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-25-16

    Children from families across the income distribution attend public schools, making schools and classrooms potential sites for interaction between more- and less-affluent children. However, limited information exists regarding the extent of economic integration in these contexts. We merge educational administrative data from Oregon with measures of family income derived from IRS records to document student exposure to economically diverse school and classroom peers. Our findings indicate that affluent children in public schools are relatively isolated from their less affluent peers, while low- and middle-income students experience relatively even peer income distributions. Students from families in the top percentile of the income distribution attend schools where 20 percent of their peers, on average, come from the top five income percentiles. A large majority of the differences in peer exposure that we observe arise from the sorting of students across schools; sorting across classrooms within schools plays a substantially smaller role.
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  • Working Paper

    School Discipline and Racial Disparities in Early Adulthood

    June 2021

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-21-14

    Despite interest in the role of school discipline in the creation of racial inequality, previous research has been unable to identify how students who receive suspensions in school differ from unsuspended classmates on key young adult outcomes. We utilize novel data to document the links between high school discipline and important young adult outcomes related to criminal justice contact, social safety net program participation, post-secondary education, and the labor market. We show that the link between school discipline and young adult outcomes tends to be stronger for Black students than for White students, and that inequality in exposure to school discipline accounts for approximately 30 percent of the Black-White disparities in young adult criminal justice outcomes and SNAP receipt.
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  • Working Paper

    Capturing More Than Poverty: School Free and Reduced-Price Lunch Data and Household Income

    December 2017

    Working Paper Number:

    carra-2017-09

    Educational researchers often use National School Lunch Program (NSLP) data as a proxy for student poverty. Under NSLP policy, students whose household income is less than 130 percent of the poverty line qualify for free lunch and students whose household income is between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty line qualify for reduced-price lunch. Linking school administrative records for all 8th graders in a California public school district to household-level IRS income tax data, we examine how well NSLP data capture student disadvantage. We find both that there is substantial disadvantage in household income not captured by NSLP category data, and that NSLP categories capture disadvantage on test scores above and beyond household income.
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