How Did People Tweet against Inflation in Japan?

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.