This thesis is motivated by the wish to balance the public debate on regulation. It aims to teach public and policy-makers about the seen und unseen effects as well as regulatory options of a particular form of regulation – occupational licensing – by using the German crafts experience....

For numerous applications it is of interest to provide full probabilistic forecasts, which are able to assign probabilities to each predicted outcome. Therefore, attention is shifting constantly from conditional mean models to probabilistic distributional models capturing location, scale, shape...

The classical Cox proportional hazards model is a benchmark approach to analyze continuous survival times in the presence of covariate information. In a number of applications, there is a need to relax one or more of its inherent assumptions, such as linearity of the predictor or the...

There has been much recent interest in Bayesian inference for generalized additive and related models. The increasing popularity of Bayesian methods for these and other model classes is mainly caused by the introduction of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation techniques which allow the...

4208 In many practical situations, simple regression models suffer from the fact that the dependence of responses on covariates can not be sufficiently described by a purely parametric predictor. For example effects of continuous covariates may be nonlinear or complex interactions between...