Signaling Resilience: A Computational Assessment of Narratives in Local Government Budgets.

This article examines how county governments in California communicate resilience efforts through their budget documents from 2012 to 2017 and whether these signals influence their underlying credit ratings issued by major rating agencies. Using computational text mining and a word embedding model, the study categorizes resilience communication into four themes—crisis management, security, preparedness, and risk management—and analyzes their presence in budget narratives. The findings indicate that despite local governments signaling resilience priorities, these signals do not have a statistically significant impact on county credit ratings, suggesting that credit rating agencies may not currently incorporate resilience language from budgets into their assessments. The study highlights the complexity and varied definitions of resilience and suggests further research on how local governments communicate resilience and how such signals might affect financial outcomes in broader contexts.