A0676
Title: How did people tweet against inflation in Japan
Authors: Toshitaka Sekine - Hitotsubashi University (Japan) [presenting]
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. A natural language processing technique is applied to tweets that comment on price changes to uncover whether there has been any change in households' sentiments against price hikes in recent years.
