The urgency of the global climate crisis requires to accelerate the speed of the sustainability transition. This paper aims at further scrutinizing the drivers of the speed of directed technological change, hence study its costs and benefits. In this paper I develop a method to estimate the technological gains and losses engendered by an environmental regulation in the form of patent rights. The method combines
two structural estimations and a synthetic control group approach. I develop a patent renewal model with exogenous environmental regulation. The probability of being regulated is increasing over time, while the patent holder is myopic to it. Identification exploits differences in patent hazard rates between patents affected by the environmental regulation and synthetic control group ones. I apply the method to estimate the technological impact of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. Exploiting a unique dataset on patents citing regulated substances and their substitutes, as well as similar non-affected patents, I estimate the technological impact of the amendment. I find that the amendment generated average gains of up to 50.000€ per cohort, concentrated on the most recent ones, while creating little losses. I run counterfactual estimations on the timing of the impact and find largest gains for contemporaneous technological shocks to the amendment.
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