This study investigates whether information about Chief Executive Officer (CEO) incentives is useful for predicting future earnings. We find that in companies with higher CEO equity incentives, current year earnings are more informative of future earnings than in other companies. Additionally,...

We use machine learning methods and high-dimensional detailed financial data to predict the direction of one-year-ahead earnings changes. Our models show significant out-of-sample predictive power: the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve ranges from 67.52% to 68.66%,...

Out-of-sample prediction of profitability is a critical step in fundamental analysis and yet even sophisticated regression models do not generate predictions that significantly outperform random walk predictions. We employ random forests with classification trees, a method from machine learning,...