Browsing by Person "Streb, Jochen"

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Catching-up and falling behind knowledge spillover from American to German machine tool makers
(2009) Richter, Ralf; Streb, Jochen
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.
Foreign patenting in Germany, 1877 - 1932
(2010) Streb, Jochen; Degner, Harald
In this paper, we use both patents? individual life span and foreign patenting activities in Germany to identify the most valuable patents of the 21 most innovative countries (except for Germany) from the European Core, the European periphery and overseas between 1877 and 1932. Our empirical analysis reveals that important characteristics of the international distribution of foreign patents are time-invariant. In particular, the distribution of foreign patents across countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was as highly skewed as it was in the late twentieth century ? and even dominated by the same major research economies. Our analysis suggests that firms? technological advantages were influenced both by exogenous local factors, such as the countries? resource endowment, and by endogenous factors, such as the national education and research system or the countries? actual stage of economic development.
Guns and butter - but no margarine
the impact of Nazi economic policies on German food consumtion, 1933-38
(2010) Spoerer, Mark; Streb, Jochen
The German population's material standard of living during the 'peace years' of the Nazi regime (1933-38) is much debated. We use hitherto disregarded consumption data and the axiom of revealed preferences to test whether the material standard of living improved. We find that the food consumption bundle realized in 1935-36 must have been inferior to that of 1927-28 although GDP per capita was much higher. Even in 1937- 38 consumers were probably worse off compared to 1927-28. We conclude that increasing consumption constraints forced German consumers to a diet and thus to a material standard of living that were much more frugal than national income figures suggest.