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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the content of the statements that are released by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) after its meetings, identify the main textual associative patterns in the statements and examine their impact on the US treasury market.

Latent semantic analysis (LSA), a language processing technique that allows recognition of the textual associative patterns in documents, is applied to all the statements released by the FOMC between 2003 and 2014, so as to identify the main textual “themes” used by the Committee in its communication to the public. The importance of the main identified “themes” is tracked over time, before examining their (collective and individual) effect on treasury market yield volatility via time-series regression analysis.

We find that FOMC statements incorporate multiple, multifaceted and recurring textual themes, with six of them being able to characterize most of the communicated monetary policy in the authors’ sample period. The themes are statistically significant in explaining the variation in three-month, two-year, five-year and ten-year treasury yields, even after controlling for monetary policy uncertainty and the concurrent economic outlook.

The main research implication of the authors’ study is that the LSA can successfully identify the most economically significant themes underlying the Fed’s communication, as the latter is expressed in monetary policy statements. The authors feel that the findings of the study would be strengthened if the analysis was repeated using intra-day (tick-by-tick or five-minute) data on treasury yields.

The authors’ findings are consistent with the notion that the move to “increased transparency” by the Fed is important and meaningful for financial and capital markets, as suggested by the significant effect that the most important identified textual themes have on treasury yield volatility.

This paper makes a timely contribution to a fairly recent stream of research that combines specific textual and statistical techniques so as to conduct content analysis. To the best of their knowledge, the authors’ study is the first that applies the LSA to the statements released by the FOMC.

The purpose of this paper is to describe in-depth a community-based social partnership, emerged in response to the financial crisis in Greece, with members from the private, public and civic sectors, using a case example of a grass-root self-organised national network.

Formal and informal interviews as well as written communication with members of the partnership mainly formed the basis for the analysis. Topics covered formation and implementation activities, outcomes, relationship issues, such as trust and links to social capital.

A shared community risk and a national media campaign to increase public awareness of the issue were catalysts for individuals’ sensitisation and participation in the partnership. The shared risk was the loss of community’s social cohesion, through poverty aggravated by the financial crisis. Self-organisation led to innovative relationships, whereas trust, collective action and collaboration show social capital attributes in the partnership enabling resilience development.

The research contributes in the fields of community-based partnerships and engagement in building community and crisis resilience. The findings are based on a case example. More evidence is needed in order to derive generalised statements about the partnership’s contribution to crisis resilience.

The partnership has shown impact on community engagement, health and well-being.

This paper presents a partnership type for building community and crisis resilience with the case example of one such partnership in Greece, formed to alleviate community distress caused by the crisis.