Open Access

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.

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).

Low temperature carburizing of a series of austenitic stainless with various combinations of chromium and nickel equivalents was performed. The investigation of the response towards low temperature carburized for three stainless steels with various Cr- and Ni-equivalents showed that the carbon uptake depends significantly on the chemical composition of the base material. The higher carbon content in the expanded austenite layer of specimen 6 (1.4565) and specimen 4 (1.4539/AISI 904L) compared to specimen 2 (1.4404/AISI 316L) is assumed to be mainly related to the difference in the specimens’ chromium content. More chromium leads to more lattice expansion. Along with the higher carbon content, higher hardness values and higher compressive residual stresses in the expanded austenite zone are introduced than for low temperature carburized AISI 316L. The residual stresses obtained from X-ray diffraction lattice strain investigation depend strongly on the chosen X-ray elastic constants. Presently, no values are known for carbon (or nitrogen) stabilized expanded austenite. Nevertheless, first principle elastic constants for γ′&minus Fe4C appear to provide realistic residual stress values. Magnetic force microscopy and measurement with an eddy current probe indicate that austenitic stainless steels can become ferromagnetic upon carburizing, similar for low temperature nitriding. The apparent transition from para- to ferromagnetism cannot be attributed entirely to the interstitially dissolved carbon content in the formed expanded austenite layer but appears to depend also on the metallic composition of the alloy, in particular the Ni content.

When designing drying processes for sensitive biological foodstuffs like fruit or vegetables, energy and time efficiency as well as product quality are gaining more and more importance. These all are greatly influenced by the different drying parameters (e.g. air temperature, air velocity and dew point temperature) in the process. In sterilization of food products the cooking value is widely used as a cross-link between these parameters. In a similar way, the so-called cumulated thermal load (CTL) was introduced for drying processes. This was possible because most quality changes mainly depend on drying air temperature and drying time. In a first approach, the CTL was therefore defined as the time integral of the surface temperature of agricultural products. When conducting experiments with mangoes and pineapples, however, it was found that the CTL as it was used had to be adjusted to a more practical form. So the definition of the CTL was improved and the behaviour of the adjusted CTL (CTLad) was investigated in the drying of pineapples and mangoes. On the basis of these experiments and the work that had been done on the cooking value, it was found, that more optimization on the CTLad had to be done to be able to compare a great variety of different products as well as different quality parameters.

With the increased deployment of biometric authentication systems, some security concerns have also arisen. In particular, presentation attacks directed to the capture device pose a severe threat. In order to prevent them, liveness features such as the blood flow can be utilised to develop presentation attack detection (PAD) mechanisms. In this context, laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) is a technology widely used in biomedical applications in order to visualise blood flow. We therefore propose a fingerprint PAD method based on textural information extracted from pre-processed LSCI images. Subsequently, a support vector machine is used for classification. In the experiments conducted on a database comprising 32 different artefacts, the results show that the proposed approach classifies correctly all bona fides. However, the LSCI technology experiences difficulties with thin and transparent overlay attacks.