IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hit/hiasdp/hias-e-150.html

How Did People Tweet against Inflation in Japan?

Author

Listed:
  • SEKINE, Toshitaka
  • WADA, Tetsuro

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.

Suggested Citation

  • SEKINE, Toshitaka & WADA, Tetsuro, 2025. "How Did People Tweet against Inflation in Japan?," Discussion paper series HIAS-E-150, Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University.
    • Handle: RePEc:hit:hiasdp:hias-e-150
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hit-u.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/2061072/files/HIAS-E-150.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Anton Korinek, 2023. "Generative AI for Economic Research: Use Cases and Implications for Economists," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 61(4), pages 1281-1317, December.
    2. Shapiro, Adam Hale & Sudhof, Moritz & Wilson, Daniel J., 2022. "Measuring news sentiment," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 228(2), pages 221-243.
    3. Jess Diamond & Kota Watanabe & Tsutomu Watanabe, 2020. "The Formation Of Consumer Inflation Expectations: New Evidence From Japan'S Deflation Experience," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 61(1), pages 241-281, February.
    4. Byeungchun Kwon & Taejin Park & Fernando Perez-Cruz & Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul, 2024. "Large language models: a primer for economists," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Batuhan Koyuncu & Byeungchun Kwon & Marco Jacopo Lombardi & Fernando Perez-Cruz & Hyun Song Shin, 2026. "BISTRO: a general purpose oracle for macroeconomic time series," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
    2. Batuhan Koyuncu & Byeungchun Kwon & Marco Jacopo Lombardi & Fernando Perez-Cruz & Hyun Song Shin, 2026. "Introducing BISTRO: a foundational model for unconditional and conditional forecasting of macroeconomic time series," BIS Working Papers 1337, Bank for International Settlements.
    3. Camille Jehle & Florian Le Gallo, 2025. "Europe in the Headlines: What Two Decades of French News Reveal about EU Sentiment," Working papers 1008, Banque de France.
    4. Seo, Beomseok, 2025. "Econometric forecasting using ubiquitous news text: Text-enhanced factor model," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 1055-1072.
    5. Pieter Nel & Renee van Eyden, 2026. "From News to Noise: Does Media Sentiment Drive Stock Market Volatility?," Working Papers 202605, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
    6. Miescu, Mirela & Rossi, Raffaele, 2021. "COVID-19-induced shocks and uncertainty," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    7. Fraccaroli, Nicolò & Giovannini, Alessandro & Jamet, Jean-François & Persson, Eric, 2022. "Ideology and monetary policy. The role of political parties’ stances in the European Central Bank’s parliamentary hearings," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    8. Dimitrios Kanelis & Pierre L. Siklos, 2025. "The ECB press conference statement: deriving a new sentiment indicator for the euro area," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(1), pages 652-664, January.
    9. Geert Bekaert & Eric C. Engstrom & Nancy R. Xu, 2022. "The Time Variation in Risk Appetite and Uncertainty," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(6), pages 3975-4004, June.
    10. Liang, Chao & Xu, Yongan & Wang, Jianqiong & Yang, Mo, 2022. "Whether dimensionality reduction techniques can improve the ability of sentiment proxies to predict stock market returns," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    11. Slonimczyk, Fabian, 2025. "This Candidate is [MASK]. Prompt-based Sentiment Extraction and Reference Letters," MPRA Paper 126675, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. Francesco Venturini, 2025. "Generative AI and Income Growth: Early Evidence on Global Data," Gospodarka Narodowa. The Polish Journal of Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, issue 3, pages 31-46.
    13. Abildgren, Kim & Kuchler, Andreas, 2021. "Revisiting the inflation perception conundrum," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    14. Narasingha Das & Partha Gangopadhyay, 2023. "Did weekly economic index and volatility index impact US food sales during the first year of the pandemic?," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 9(1), pages 1-23, December.
    15. Bloom, Nicholas & Davis, Steven J. & Hansen, Stephen & Lambert, Peter John & Sadun, Raffaella & Taska, Bledi, 2023. "Remote work across jobs, companies and space," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 121302, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    16. Iñaki Aldasoro & Ajit Desai, 2025. "AI agents for cash management in payment systems," BIS Working Papers 1310, Bank for International Settlements.
    17. Picault, Matthieu & Pinter, Julien & Renault, Thomas, 2022. "Media sentiment on monetary policy: Determinants and relevance for inflation expectations," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 124(C).
    18. Julien Pinter & Evžen Kočenda, 2025. "Media Treatment of Monetary Policy Surprises and Their Impact on Firms' and Consumers' Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 57(7), pages 1793-1842, October.
    19. Tsutomu Watanabe, 2025. "Comment on “The Evolution of Inflation Expectations in Japan”," Asian Economic Policy Review, Japan Center for Economic Research, vol. 20(2), pages 218-219, July.
    20. Duygu Ider & Stefan Lessmann, 2022. "Forecasting Cryptocurrency Returns from Sentiment Signals: An Analysis of BERT Classifiers and Weak Supervision," Papers 2204.05781, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2023.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C0 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - General
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hit:hiasdp:hias-e-150. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Digital Resources Section, Hitotsubashi University Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ashitjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.