1. Introduction
While a large body of accounting research provides evidence on the informational role of accounting data at the firm level (see, e.g., Beaver (1998) and Kothari (2001) for reviews of related literature), the link between accounting earnings and the macroeconomy remains relatively unexplored. This study investigates the informativeness of accounting earnings for growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
GDP is the key summary statistic of economic activity (e.g., Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2007) and the most important variable in analyses of economic growth (e.g., Henderson et al., 2012). It is used by the White House and Congress to prepare the Federal Budget, by the Federal Reserve to formulate monetary policy, by Wall Street as an indicator of economic activity, and by the business community as a key input for production, investment, and employment decisions. In research on forecasting GDP growth, a central finding is that professional macro forecasters outperform time-series models (e.g., Zarnowitz and Braun, 1993; Stark, 2010). However, by and large macroeconomics research has evolved independently from accounting research, which is typically conducted at the firm level, and thus there is a dearth of evidence on the informativeness of accounting earnings for GDP growth.