Konchitchki and Patatoukas (2014) (hereafter KP 2014) show that aggregate accounting earnings growth predicts future nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and that professional macro forecasters do not fully incorporate the information contained in aggregate accounting earnings. Based on...

We use the k-nearest neighbors (i.e., k-NN) algorithm to forecast a firm’s annual earnings by matching its recent trend in annual earnings to historical earnings sequences of “neighbor” firms. Our forecasts are more accurate than forecasts obtained from the random walk, the regression...