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Equity issues have led many economists to reconsider their preference for conducting efficiency analyses with aggregated estimates of the benefits and costs of changes in environmental resource allocations. For example, evidence suggests that health risks due to hazardous wastes disproportionately affect the poor and non White. Disproportionate outcomes are not necessarily inefficient, however. The purpose of this article is to propose a demand-side approach for environmental equity analysis that is based on a technique adapted from the labor economics of wage discrimination. Applying the test to the demand for water quality, we find that willingness to pay values are not equal for White and non-White survey respondents. The empirical results lead to some observations about environmental equity analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. Previous research has concluded that public school quality is capitalized into local house prices. This result is reasonable if residents are assigned to local schools and have no freedom of school choice. The magnet school concept gives parents some degree of freedom of choice for schools within a local school district. The availability of magnet schools should thus reduce the capitalized value of school quality within a school district. This hypothesis is tested using data from Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina. The results show that school levels where the magnet program has been most extensively implemented have lower capitalized values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]