By comparing the cross-country citation performance of patents registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), this paper investigates how the economic crisis that Japan faced in the early 1990s altered the innovation capacity of the nation once regarded as a technological powerhouse. The following main findings are reported based on a difference-in-differences framework. First, overall, Japan performed poorly in terms of citations received for its patents compared to control patents in the post-crisis period. This corroborates with the common finding that Japan suffered a marked decline in research performance compared to international standards in the 1990s and 2000s. Second, the crisis exerted prolonged adverse effects on the citation performance of Japanese patents, even 10 years after the crisis. In particular, it caused a permanent drop in non–US citations of Japanese patents. This reduction in citations offset the superior performance of Japanese patents in the pre-crisis period.

通过比较在美国专利商标局（USPTO）注册的专利的跨国引用表现，本文研究了日本在1990年代初面临的经济危机如何改变了曾经被视为技术强国的国家的创新能力。 。基于差异框架报告了以下主要发现。首先，总体而言，日本在危机后时期获得的专利引用与对照专利相比表现不佳。这与日本在1990年代和2000年代相比国际标准的研究性能显着下降的共同发现相佐证。其次，危机对日本专利的引用性能产生了长期的负面影响，甚至在危机发生十年之后。特别是，它导致非美国对日本专利的引用永久减少。引文数量的减少抵消了危机前日本专利的出色表现。