We examine whether earnings announcement textual tone, aggregated across individual publicly traded firms, helps to predict future GDP growth. Prior literature shows changes in aggregate accounting earnings are useful in predicting future economic growth, but only when aggregate earnings changes...

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...