Catching-up and falling behind knowledge spillover from American to German machine tool makers

In our days, German machine tool makers accuse their Chinese competitors of violating patent rights and illegally imitating German technology. A century ago, however, German machine tool makers used exactly the same methods to imitate American technology. To understand the dynamics of this catching-up process we use patent statistics to analyze firms? activities between 1877 and 1932. We show that German machine tool makers successfully deployed imitating and counterfeiting activities in the late 19th century and the 1920s to catchup to their American competitors. The German administration supported this strategy by stipulating a patent law that discriminated against foreign patent holders and probably also by delaying the granting of patents to foreign applicants. Parallel to the growing international competitiveness of German firms, however, the willingness to guarantee intellectual property rights of foreigners was also increasing because German firms had now to fear retaliatory measures in their own export markets when violating foreign property rights within Germany

Fiscal Policy, Trigger Points and Interest Rates: Additional Evidence From the U.S.

We empirically investigate whether the relationship between interest rates and public deficits/debt may be nonlinear for the U.S. Using threshold estimation, we find evidence of level-dependent effects on interest rates, implying a significant effect of projected deficits and debt in the U.S. only if the deficit surpasses approximately 5% of GDP

Microbial Succession during Thermophilic Digestion: The Potential of Methanosarcina sp

A distinct succession from a hydrolytic to a hydrogeno- and acetotrophic community was well documented by DGGE (denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis) and dHPLC (denaturing high performance liquid chromatography), and confirmed by qPCR (quantitative PCR) measurements and DNA sequence analyses. We could prove that Methanosarcina thermophila has been the most important key player during the investigated anaerobic digestion process. This organism was able to terminate a stagnation phase, most probable caused by a decreased pH and accumulated acetic acid following an initial hydrolytic stage. The lack in Methanosarcina sp. could not be compensated by high numbers of Methanothermobacter sp. or Methanoculleus sp., which were predominant during the initial or during the stagnation phase of the fermentation, respectively