'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

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

Do electrons change their c-axis kinetic energy upon entering the superconducting state?

The interlayer tunneling mechanism of the cuprate high temperature superconductors involves a conversion of the confinement kinetic energy of the electrons perpendicular to the CuO-planes ($c$-axis) in the normal state to the pair binding energy in the superconducting state. This mechanism is discussed and the arguments are presented from the point of view of general principles. It is shown that recent measurements of the $c$-axis properties support the idea that the electrons substantially lower their $c$-axis kinetic energy upon entering the superconducting state, a change that is nearly impossible in any conventional mechanism. The proper use of a $c$-axis conductivity sum rule is shown to resolve puzzles involving the penetration depth and the optical measurements.Comment: A few typos are corrected and the footnote 11 expande

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

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.