The Demand for Sons: Evidence from Divorce, Fertility, and Shotgun Marriage

This paper shows how parental preferences for sons versus daughters affect divorce, child custody, marriage, shotgun marriage when the sex of the child is known before birth, and fertility stopping rules. We document that parents with girls are significantly more likely to be divorced, that divorced fathers are more likely to have custody of their sons, and that women with only girls are substantially more likely to have never been married. Perhaps the most striking evidence comes from the analysis of shotgun marriages. Among those who have an ultrasound test during their pregnancy, mothers carrying a boy are more likely to be married at delivery. When we turn to fertility, we find that in families with at least two children, the probability of having another child is higher for all-girl families than all-boy families. This preference for sons seems to be largely driven by fathers, with men reporting they would rather have a boy by more than a two to one margin. In the final part of the paper, we compare the effects for the U.S. to five developing countries.

Governance Patterns on the Urban-Port Threshold. The Emergence of the City of the Cluster

Ports are sophisticated infrastructures that have contributed to disrupting the original state of places according to a mechanism that leads from alterations to project. Port cities generate in their environments a liminal condition which usually characterizes the urban-port area that, located along and across the common administrative border, can be recognized as an urban-port threshold. This threshold generates a liminal space which is configured as a third state with respect to the city or the port properly understood. It is a system of linear convergence/divergence that marks the beginning and the end of the capabilities of the Port Authority. This threshold does not have a standard configuration but is shaped into different geometries and constituted by a constellation of artefacts and architectures belonging to both sides and in different state of abandonment/disposal/disuse. The geometries of the urban-port thresholds generate different governance patterns which, in the current framework, are particularly influenced by evolving global phenomena. Among these, the port clustering (effective in many Europeans cases but introduced in Italy only in 2016) produces a complex polycentric conurbation, a City of the Cluster. Composed by several ports and cities, this new urban-port reality emerges to be responsible for new relational opportunities in the decades to come

Port Resilience Practices. The Ecosystem Vision and the Cluster Concept within the RUMBLE and The Dunes Urban Park projects in Genoa

As is emerging in several contemporary studies, there are city-port contexts in which it is increasingly possible to identify new port resilience practices, namely those capable of overcoming past design situations and providing new perspectives on the city-port relationship; these practices are intervening in a prioritized way on the common border. Within these contexts, the capacity of port systems to engage with the city and, while still maintaining their operational aspect, to mitigate the effects of the demarcation generated by property borders can be seen. What further emerges is that ports are extensively fostering practices capable to go beyond the traditional port perimeter; this is contributing to turn the port into a driver of strategic projects. New urgencies, e.g. the harmful acoustic impacts generated by the port noise, are even enhancing the relevance of common borders, becoming new design challenges. These factors are all decisive in the case presented by this article which concerns a portion of the city-port interface in the port of Genoa-Prà. Thanks to the cross-border INTERREG project RUMBLE and its translation into The Dunes Urban Park, this case represents an effective port resilience practice that, by contributing to the redesign of the city-port ecosystem through a multi- dimensional approach, it is opening an unprecedented perspective of multi-scale territorial clustering between several ports, cities and institutions

Euclidean Thermal Green Functions of Photons in Generalized Euclidean Rindler Spaces for any Feynman-like Gauge

The thermal Euclidean Green functions for Photons propagating in the Rindler wedge are computed employing an Euclidean approach within any covariant Feynman-like gauge. This is done by generalizing a formula which holds in the Minkowskian case. The coincidence of the found (\be=2\pi)-Green functions and the corresponding Minkowskian vacuum Green functions is discussed in relation to the remaining static gauge ambiguity already found in previous papers. Further generalizations to more complicated manifolds are discussed. Ward identities are verified in the general case.Comment: 12 pages, standard latex, no figures, some signs changed, more comments added, final version to appear on Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Bimagnon studies in cuprates with Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering at the O K edge. II - The doping effect in La2-xSrxCuO4

We present RIXS data at O K edge from La2-xSrxCuO4 vs. doping between x=0.10 and x=0.22 with attention to the magnetic excitations in the Mid-Infrared region. The sampling done by RIXS is the same as in the undoped cuprates provided the excitation is at the first pre-peak induced by doping. Note that this excitation energy is about 1.5 eV lower than that needed to see bimagnons in the parent compound. This approach allows the study of the upper region of the bimagnon continuum around 450 meV within about one third of the Brilluoin Zone around \Gamma. The results show the presence of damped bimagnons and of higher even order spin excitations with almost constant spectral weight at all the dopings explored here. The implications on high Tc studies are briefly addressed

The evolution of the number density of compact galaxies

We compare the number density of compact (small size) massive galaxies at low and high redshift using our Padova Millennium Galaxy and Group Catalogue (PM2GC) at z=0.03-0.11 and the CANDELS results from Barro et al. (2013) at z=1-2. The number density of local compact galaxies with luminosity weighted (LW) ages compatible with being already passive at high redshift is compared with the density of compact passive galaxies observed at high-z. Our results place an upper limit of a factor ~2 to the evolution of the number density and are inconsistent with a significant size evolution for most of the compact galaxies observed at high-z. The evolution may be instead significant (up to a factor 5) for the most extreme, ultracompact galaxies. Considering all compact galaxies, regardless of LW age and star formation activity, a minority of local compact galaxies (<=1/3) might have formed at z<1. Finally, we show that the secular decrease of the galaxy stellar mass due to simple stellar evolution may in some cases be a non-negligible factor in the context of the evolution of the mass-size relation, and we caution that passive evolution in mass should be taken into account when comparing samples at different redshifts.Comment: ApJ in pres

Higgs signals and hard photons at the Next Linear Collider: the ZZZZ-fusion channel in the Standard Model

In this paper, we extend the analyses carried out in a previous article for $WW$-fusion to the case of Higgs production via $ZZ$-fusion within the Standard Model at the Next Linear Collider, in presence of electromagnetic radiation due real photon emission. Calculations are carried out at tree-level and rates of the leading order (LO) processes e^+e^-\rightarrow e^+e^- H \ar e^+e^- b\bar b and e^+e^-\rightarrow e^+e^- H \ar e^+e^- WW \ar e^+e^- \mathrm{jjjj} are compared to those of the next-to-leading order (NLO) reactions e^+e^-\rightarrow e^+e^- H (\gamma)\ar e^+e^- b\bar b \gamma and e^+e^-\rightarrow e^+e^- H (\gamma)\ar e^+e^- WW (\gamma) \ar e^+e^- \mathrm{jjjj}\gamma, in the case of energetic and isolated photons.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX, 5 PostScript figures embedded using epsfig and bitmapped at 100dpi, complete paper including high definition figures available at ftp://axpa.hep.phy.cam.ac.uk/stefano/cavendish_9611.ps or at http://www.hep.phy.cam.ac.uk/theory/papers

QCD effects and bb-tagging at LEP I

We analyze the impact of using $b$-tagged samples in studying non-Abelian effects due to QCD in e^+e^-\ar 4jet events at $\sqrt s=M_{Z^0}$, using angular variable analyses and comparisons with e^+e^-\ar 3 \mbox{jet}\gamma events. We find that QCD effects are largely enhanced in $b$-quark samples with respect to `unflavoured' ones, where energy-ordering is used to distinguish between gluon and quark jets. We show that the $b$-quark mass influences the angular distributions significantly and should not be neglectedComment: 16 pages, latex, 11 figures appended (tarred and uuencoded), the complete paper is available via anonymous ftp at ftp://cpt1.dur.ac.uk/pub/preprints/dtp94/dtp94104/ (get dtp94104_*.ps