'Bed and Board' in Lieu of salary : Women and Girl Children Domestics in Post Partition Calcutta (1951-1981)

Research on women's work has attempted to analyse how the interplay of market and patriarchy leads women and men to perform different economic roles in society. This segregation on the basis of gender or the sex-typing of work plays an important role both from the demand and supply sides in determining the work profiles of women and girl children. The present study attempts to see how a particular labour market, i.e. domestic service, a traditionally male domain, became segregated both by gender and age in post partition West Bengal (WB) and mainly in its capital city Calcutta. We have argued that the downward trend in industrial job opportunities in post independence WB accompanied by large scale immigration of women, men and children from the bordering East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, led to an unprecedented increase in labour force under conditions of stagnant investment. This in turn led to a decline in the wage rate. In such a situation poor refugee women in their frantic search for means of survival gradually drove out the males of the host population engaged in domestic service in urban WB by offering to work in return for a very low and often for no wage at all. Again, poor males from the neighboring states of Bihar, Orissa and UP constituted historically a substantial section of the Calcutta labour market and many of them were employed as domestics in a state known for its prevalence of domestic service in colonial India. The replacement of male domestics by females was further facilitated by the gradual decline in inter-state migration due to lack of employment opportunities in independent WB. The second stage in the changing profile of domestic service in urban WB was arguably set by the migrating girl children from the rural areas of the state to Calcutta city in search for employment between 1971 and 1981.gender roles, labour supply, labour demand, India

Comments on Kerr effect and gyrotropic order in cuprates

I comment on two recent papers on Kerr effect as evidence of gyrotropic order in cuprates, and I suggest that the arguments may not be sound. The difficulty is that in practically all cases the wave vector $k_{z}$ perpendicular to the copper-oxygen plane is not a good quantum number. This appears to be problematic for arXiv:1212.2698, whereas in arXiv:1212.2274 the symmetry arguments may turn out to be robust, but the microscopic picture is wanting. Thus, the Kerr effect in cuprates remains a puzzle, as there is little doubt that the arguments presented against time reversal symmetry breaking appear to be rather strong in both of these papers on experimental grounds.Comment: 3.25 page

Angle-resolved photoemission spectra in the cuprates from the d-density wave theory

Angle-resolved photoemission spectra present two challenges for the d-density wave (DDW) theory of the pseudogap state of the cuprates: (1) hole pockets near $(\pi/2,\pi/2)$ are not observed, in apparent contradiction with the assumption of translational symmetry breaking, and (2) there are no well-defined quasiparticles at the {\it antinodal} points, in contradiction with the predictions of mean-field theory of this broken symmetry state. Here, we show how these puzzles can be resolved.Comment: 4 pages, 3 eps figures, RevTex

Scaling of von Neumann entropy at the Anderson transition

Extensive body of work has shown that for the model of a non-interacting electron in a random potential there is a quantum critical point for dimensions greater than two---a metal-insulator transition. This model also plays an important role in the plateau-to-plateu transition in the integer quantum Hall effect, which is also correctly captured by a scaling theory. Yet, in neither of these cases the ground state energy shows any non-analyticity as a function of a suitable tuning parameter, typically considered to be a hallmark of a quantum phase transition, similar to the non-analyticity of the free energy in a classical phase transition. Here we show that von Neumann entropy (entanglement entropy) is non-analytic at these phase transitions and can track the fundamental changes in the internal correlations of the ground state wave function. In particular, it summarizes the spatially wildly fluctuating intensities of the wave function close to the criticality of the Anderson transition. It is likely that all quantum phase transitions can be similarly described.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, submitted as a chapter in the book "50 years of Anderson localization

High temperature superconductivity: from complexity to simplicity

I discuss the recent quantum oscillation experiments in the underdoped high temperature superconductors.Comment: An edited shorter version is published in Scienc

Stealth-Trading: Which Traders' Trades Move Stock Prices?

Using audit trail data for a sample of NYSE firms, we show that medium size trades are associated with a disproportionately large cumulative stock price change relative to their proportion of all trades and volume. This result is consistent with the predictions of the stealth- trading hypothesis (Barclay and Warner (1993)). We find that the source of this disproportionately large cumulative price impact of medium size trades is trades initiated by institutions. This result appears robust to various sensitivity checks. Our findings appear to confirm street lore that institutions are informed traders.stealth-trading, adverse selection, informed trading, trade size

Activated scaling in disorder rounded first-order quantum phase transitions

First-order phase transitions, classical or quantum, subject to randomness coupled to energy-like variables (bond randomness) can be rounded, resulting in continuous transitions (emergent criticality). We study perhaps the simplest such model, quantum three-color Ashkin-Teller model and show that the quantum critical point in $(1+1)$ dimension is an unusual one, with activated scaling at the critical point and Griffiths-McCoy phase away from it. The behavior is similar to the transverse random field Ising model, even though the pure system has a first-order transition in this case. We believe that this fact must be attended to when discussing quantum critical points in numerous physical systems, which may be first-order transitions in disguise.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

An examination of own account trading by dual traders in futures markets

Using proprietary audit trail transaction data compiled by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, we investigate, at the individual trader level, (1) the timing and (2) the determinants of dual traders' personal trades. Our analysis reveals an absence of any trade timing by dual traders in relation to the execution of their customers' orders. Even after simultaneously controlling for factors representing information, liquidity supply and inventory control, within a multivariate regression framework, liquidity supply and inventory control remain as the determinants of dual traders' personal trades. Overall, the emergent profile of a dual trader is that of an uninformed trader performing complimentary tasks of liquidity provision and personal inventory management. These results survive extensive robustness checks, question the assumptions underpinning the extant theoretical research and have important policy implications.

Multiparticle ring exchange in the Wigner glass and its possible relevance to strongly interacting two-dimensional electron systems in the presence of disorder

We consider a two-dimensional electron or hole system at zero temperature and low carrier densities, where the long-range Coulomb interactions dominate over the kinetic energy. In this limit the clean system will form a Wigner crystal. Non-trivial quantum mechanical corrections to the classical ground state lead to multiparticle exchange processes that can be expressed as an effective spin Hamiltonian involving competing interactions. Disorder will destroy the Wigner crystal on large length scales, and the resulting state is called a Wigner glass. The notion of multiparticle exchange processes is still applicable in the Wigner glass, but the exchange frequencies now follow a random distribution. We compute the exchange frequencies for a large number of relevant exchange processes in the Wigner crystal, and the frequency distributions for some important processes in the Wigner glass. The resulting effective low energy spin Hamiltonian should be the starting point of an analysis of the possible ground state phases and quantum phase transitions between them. We find that disorder plays a crucial role and speculate on a possible zero temperature phase diagram.Comment: 17 pages and 12 figure