Grandparents and women's participation in the labor market

The conciliation of work and family life is a challenge to most women. In some countries, although not in southern Europe, women make significant use of part-time schedules as a way of balancing work and family life. Informal care, typically care by grandparents, is an alternative. It is cheap, trustworthy, and possibly compatible with non-standard labor schedules. In this paper we investigate how childcare by grandparents affects the probability of working of mothers in southern European countries. We empirically evaluate the verification and the significance of such an effect, accounting for a potentially endogenous grandparent-caring status.labor market, women, childcare, grandparents, ageing.

Comment on "Energies of the ground state and first excited 0+0^{+} in an exactly solvable pairing model"

We comment on a recent application of the RPA method and its extensions to the case of the two-level pairing model by N. Dinh Dang [1].Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, submitted to EPJ

An Analogy of the Quantum Hall Condutivity in a Lorentz-symmetry Violation Setup

We investigated some influences of unconventional physics, such Lorentz-symmetry violation, for quantum mechanical systems. In this context, we calculated a important contribution for Standard Model Extension. In the non-relativistic limit, we obtained a analogy of the Landau levels and the quantum Hall conductivity related to this contribution for low energy systems.Comment: 12 pages, no figure

Oscillator models of the solar cycle: Towards the development of inversion methods

This article reviews some of the leading results obtained in solar dynamo physics by using temporal oscillator models as a tool to interpret observational data and dynamo model predictions. We discuss how solar observational data such as the sunspot number is used to infer the leading quantities responsible for the solar variability during the last few centuries. Moreover, we discuss the advantages and difficulties of using inversion methods (or backward methods) over forward methods to interpret the solar dynamo data. We argue that this approach could help us to have a better insight about the leading physical processes responsible for solar dynamo, in a similar manner as helioseismology has helped to achieve a better insight on the thermodynamic structure and flow dynamics in the Sun's interior.Comment: 28 pages; 16 figures, ISSI Workshop 11-15 November 2013 - The Solar Cycle, http://www.issibern.ch/program/workshops.htm

Biconservative surfaces in BCV-spaces

Biconservative hypersurfaces are hypersurfaces with conservative stress-energy tensor with respect to the bienergy functional, and form a geometrically interesting family which includes that of biharmonic hypersurfaces. In this paper we study biconservative surfaces in the 3-dimensional Bianchi-Cartan-Vranceanu spaces, obtaining their characterization in the following cases: when they form a constant angle with the Hopf vector field; when they are SO(2)-invariant.Comment: 12 page