Paper Title
Using Financial and Economic Leading Indicators to Predict Sales of Publicly Traded Companies

Abstract
This article proposes a modeling procedure that combines time series and regression analysis for estimating sales of publicly traded companies based on internal financial and economic leading indicators. First, this article proposes a data transformation equation to improve linear relationships between preceding financial and economic variables and sales performance. Second, based on these improved relationships, a modeling procedure that combines time series and regression analysis is used to develop sales forecasting models for four sample construction companies. The out-of-sample forecasting accuracy is evaluated using mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). The results show that the MAPE values in the forecasting models range from 0.89% to 4.94% with an average of 2.68%, which outperforms a similar study that uses the vector autoregression (VAR) model and the Litterman Bayesian vector autoregression (LBVAR) model. Index Terms - Sales forecasting, Structural model, Time series regression model