We examine whether management forecast errors (MFEs), which are traditionally interpreted as backward-looking indicators of how well forecasts preempted earnings announcements, also operate as forward-looking measures that aid with predicting future earnings. This possibility arises if an MFE represents unrealized revenues or expenses a manager originally anticipated to occur in the forecast period but that ultimately occur in subsequent periods. Consistent with this possibility, we document that optimistic MFEs contain incremental information over current earnings for predicting future earnings realizations. This finding does not extend to pessimistic MFEs, consistent with such errors reflecting expectations management. The predictive information in optimistic MFEs is negatively related to managers' incentives to intentionally bias the forecast and is positively related to managerial ability. Analysts' post-earnings announcement forecasts for the subsequent period overestimate the future realization of MFEs, but such overestimation is less severe when managers issue timely post-earnings announcement forecast revisions for subsequent periods. Data Availability: Data used in this study are publicly available from sources identified in the text.

We examine whether corporate financing activities (CFA) in aggregate convey information about the macroeconomy. Using statement of cash flow information to construct a bottom-up measure of CFA, we find that it has significant predictive power for future economic activity when we exclude a small set of firms whose external financing is largely insulated from macroeconomic conditions. This CFA index has predictive power beyond that of the Gilchrist-Zakrajsek credit spread, aggregate earnings, and other macroeconomic indicators in predicting future GDP in both in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting tests. Impulse responses from a structural vector autoregression show that unexpected decreases in this CFA index lead to a large and persistent contraction in economic activity for up to four quarters. Our results suggest that a simple portfolio-based CFA measure helps capture supply-of-capital effects from the financial accelerator mechanism and hence has significant incremental predictive power for real economic activity. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.