How Did People Tweet against Inflation in Japan?

Toshitaka Sekineカ and Tetsuro Wada

No HIAS-E-150, Discussion paper series from Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: During the chronic deflation era starting in the 1990s, Japanese inflation expectations were said to be firmly anchored at a very low level, say, around zero. These expectations seemed to have become something like the social norm. Households were quite against any price hikes, and as a consequence, firms hesitated to raise their prices — when they raised prices, they apologized for their misbehavior. People not only expected that prices would not increase, but also believed that prices should not increase. That social norm may have changed in response to inflationary shocks after COVID-19 and the Ukraine war. We applied a natural language processing technique to tweets that commented on price hikes and found an increase in posts after 2021 that accepted price hikes for various goods. Some of these posts indicated even positive feelings and mentioned salary hikes.

Keywords: tweet; natural language processing; sentiment analysis; inflation expectation; monetary policy; Japan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C0 E31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2025-08-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cba, nep-mon and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hit-u.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/2061072/files/HIAS-E-150.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hit:hiasdp:hias-e-150

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion paper series from Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Digital Resources Section, Hitotsubashi University Library ().