Dimitrios D. Thomakos is Professor of Applied Econometrics and Head of the Department of Economics at the University of Peloponnese, Greece, and Senior Fellow and Member of the Scientific Committee at the Rimini Center for Economic Analysis in Italy. Dimitrios holds an MA, MPhil and PhD from the Department of Economics of Columbia University, US. His research work has appeared in several prestigious international journals in economics and finance such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Canadian Journal of Economics, the Review of International Economics and many others.  Konstantinos (Kostas) I. Nikolopoulos is Professor of Decision Sciences at Bangor Business School, UK. He is also the Director of forLAB, a forecasting laboratory, and the Director of Research for the College of Business, Law, Education and Social Sciences. He received both his Engineering Doctorate Diploma in Electrical and his Computer Engineering (MEng) fromthe National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He is an expert in time series analysis & forecasting, forecasting support systems and forecasting the impact of special events. Professor Nikolopoulos has published in a number of prestigious journals and is an Associate Editor of Oxford IMA Journal of Management Mathematics and Supply Chain Forum: An International Journal.