For many years a system of leading, coincident, and lagging economic indicators, first developed in the 1930s by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), has been widely used in the United States to appraise the state of the business cycle. Since 1961 the current monthly figures for...

Probabilistic forecasts play a significant role in a wide variety of economics activities. However, established econometric modeling approaches for probabilistic forecasts may yield unsatisfactory forecasting performance due to model misspecification. In my dissertation, I try to minimize such a...