Arata Ito

Arata Ito is a Senior Fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) in Japan. His research focuses on uncertainty and social learning. Ito conducts a research project on the effects of policy uncertainty on the real economy and financial markets. As part of this project, he updates data on news-based economic policy uncertainty indices for Japan each month. The data is available on the RIETI website as well as at PolicyUncertainty.com. He is also engaged in a research project on social learning using both big data on consumption and newspaper coverage in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.