Overview
This paper was a term paper for a course I took my freshman year: environmental economics. The goal of the class was to gain an understanding of how current economic literature models environmental problems. One of the ways we had to demonstrate our understanding of such concepts was to take a baseline model from an existing paper, and synthesize it with ideas from other papers presented throughout the course. As a bonus, any paper that introduced something novel would earn an A.
My novel proposition was that, while there are many policy methods to bring socially and privately optimal levels of waste management into equilibrium, each having its own pros and cons, one policy has a significant benefit: under the right conditions, an emission tax or marketable permit system for waste that damages the environment will cause firms to invest more heavily in R&D, increasing technology avaliable to dispose of waste in an environmentally friendly way. It was that idea that gave birth to my first research paper, which models a firm's R&D investment into AI solutions for waste management applications.