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Language barriers and the speed of international knowledge diffusion

Nature Human Behaviour (2026)Cite this article

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Abstract

Language barriers and translation costs are persistent obstacles to communication and have particularly pronounced economic impacts in technical domains. Here we provide causal evidence on the effects of language barriers on the speed and extent of knowledge diffusion by exploiting a change in US patent policy that resulted in earlier disclosure of English-language technical knowledge from Japan. Using a targeted sample of 2,770 citations from US-based inventors to Japanese inventions, we find that language barriers accounted for almost half the diffusion lag of Japan-originating knowledge to US-based inventors, relative to Japan-based inventors. This acceleration is significant only for firms with limited ability to translate (small research and development scale, or little involvement in the Japanese market) and is more pronounced for the diffusion of high-quality inventions, suggesting difficulties in quality-targeted translation. Thus, early publication of patent applications provides a substantial public good for cumulative innovation through accelerated access to translated foreign patents.

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Fig. 1: Average time to first citation for focal cohort.
Fig. 2: Average time to first citation to the US–EP twin cohort.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this work are available from the authors upon request; however, due to the proprietary nature of some of our data sources, data are not publicly available. The data sources used in this work are PATSTAT, which is proprietary and can be purchased from the EPO, PatentsView/USPTO (which is public and downloadable from patentsview.org) and RIETI data (Japanese in-text citations), which were commissioned from Artificial Life Research and are proprietary.

Code availability

Code used for the analyses throughout this work is available via Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YPTDGX. We note that all code is written for Stata.

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Acknowledgements

This study comprises part of the programme ‘Innovation Capability Building and Incentive Design: Evidence from Micro Data’ at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We thank A. Jaffe, L. L. Ouellette, participants at the 2023 European Policy for Intellectual Property Conference and the 2023 European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE) Conference, seminar participants at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, members of the RIETI innovation studies group, and the RIETI Discussion Paper review group for their comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, Wellington, New Zealand

    Kyle Higham

  2. Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry, Tokyo, Japan

    Sadao Nagaoka

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  1. Kyle Higham
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  2. Sadao Nagaoka
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Contributions

Both authors conceived of the study and developed the empirical framework, K.H. collected the data, conducted the empirical analyses and wrote the original draft, S.N. provided critical feedback on methods and results throughout the project, and both authors contributed to preparing and editing the final version of the paper.

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Correspondence to Kyle Higham.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Kenneth Huang and Tetsuo Wada for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Higham, K., Nagaoka, S. Language barriers and the speed of international knowledge diffusion. Nat Hum Behav (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02367-3

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