HIAS Discussion Paper No. HIAS‑E‑150 Published in The Japanese Economic Review

The Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS) is pleased to announce that its Discussion Paper No. HIAS‑E‑150, “How Did People Tweet against Inflation in Japan?” authored by Toshitaka Sekine (Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University) and Tetsuro Wada (Finatext Ltd.), has been published in the leading economics journal The Japanese Economic Review.

This paper was originally presented at the JER‑HIAS‑Kakenhi Joint Conference, “Macroeconomics and Japan’s Reality: Effects of Monetary and Fiscal Policies,” held in August 2025. The conference was jointly organized by the Research Center for Global Economic Systems (GLECS) and the JSPS Grant‑in‑Aid for Scientific Research (A) project, “Construction of New Uncertainty Indicators and Theoretical and Econometric Analyses of Their Impacts on Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy” (Principal Investigator: Toshiaki Watanabe, Graduate School of Social Data Science; Project No. 23H00048).

The study examines how Japan’s long‑standing social norms—shaped during decades of deflation and characterized by the belief that “prices do not rise and should not rise”—have shifted in the recent inflationary environment following the COVID‑19 pandemic and geopolitical developments. Using natural language processing to analyze posts on Twitter (now X), the authors reveal how public sentiment toward price increases has evolved.

Paper Information

https://hias.hit-u.ac.jp/hias_dps/hias-e-150

External Link

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42973-026-00236-w