The growth of government (GoG) has garnered significant attention among scholars and practitioners across disciplines such as economics, political science, and public management. Despite the optimism surrounding this concept, its future trajectory in the twenty-first century remains uncertain....

Forecast combination has been proven to be a very important technique to obtain accurate predictions for various applications in economics, finance, marketing and many other areas. In many applications, forecast errors exhibit heavy-tailed behaviors for various reasons. Unfortunately, to our...

It is often reported in the forecast combination literature that a simple average of candidate forecasts is more robust than sophisticated combining methods. This phenomenon is usually referred to as the “forecast combination puzzle”. Motivated by this puzzle, we explore its possible...