Open Access

The following sabbatical semester report documents the activities accomplished, the valuable experiences, and the resulting and potential gains for the University of Applied Sciences.

Many countries offer state credit guarantees to support credit-constrained exporters. The policy instrument is commonly justified by governments as a means to mitigating adverse outcomes of financial market frictions for exporting firms. Accumulated returns to the German state credit guarantee scheme deriving from risk-compensating premia have outweighed accumulated losses over the past 60 years. Why do private financial agents not step in and provide insurance given that the state-run program yields positive returns? We argue that costs of risk diversification, liquidity management, and coordination among creditors limit the ability of private financial agents to offer comparable insurance products. Moreover, we suggest that the government’s greater effectiveness in recovering claims in foreign countries endows the state with a cost advantage in dealing with the risks involved in large export projects. We test these hypotheses using monthly firm-level data combined with official transaction-level data on covered exports of German firms and find suggestive evidence that positive effects on trade are due to mitigated financial constraints: State credit guarantees benefit firms that are dependent on external finance, if the value at risk which they seek to cover is large, and at times when refinancing conditions on the private financial market are tight.

The recovery of our body and brain from fatigue directly depends on the quality of sleep, which can be determined from the results of a sleep study. The classification of sleep stages is the first step of this study and includes the measurement of vital data and their further processing. The non-invasive sleep analysis system is based on a hardware sensor network of 24 pressure sensors providing sleep phase detection. The pressure sensors are connected to an energy-efficient microcontroller via a system-wide bus. A significant difference between this system and other approaches is the innovative way in which the sensors are placed under the mattress. This feature facilitates the continuous use of the system without any noticeable influence on the sleeping person. The system was tested by conducting experiments that recorded the sleep of various healthy young people. Results indicate the potential to capture respiratory rate and body movement.

In my research sabbatical I was working on three different topics, namely orthogonal polynomials in geometric modeling, re-parametrized univariate subdivision curves, and reconstruction of 3d-fish-models and other zoological artifacts. In the subsequent Sections, I will describe my particular activity in these different fields. The sections are meant to present an overview of my research activities, leaving out the technical details. Section 1 is on orthogonal polynomials and other related generating systems for functions systems of smooth function. In Section 2, I will discuss the application of various re-parametrization schemes for interpolatory subdivision algorithms for the generation of space curves. The next Section 3 is concerned with my research at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, in collaboration with Dr. Ulrike Siebeck from the School of Biomedical Sciences on fish behavior and reconstruction of 3d-fish models in particular. In the last Section 4, I will describe what effects this research will have on in my subsequent teaching at the University of Applied Science Konstanz (HTWG).

Erfahrungsbericht zum Freistellungssemester im Wintersemester 2019/2020 an der University of Auckland, Neuseeland