Household income as a determinant of child labor and school enrollment in Brazil: Evidence from a social security reform

This paper studies the effects of household income on labor participation and school enrollment of children aged 10 to 14 in Brazil using a social security reform as a source of exogenous variation in household income. We find that increased benefits are associated with increases in school enrollment for girls, as well as a smaller reduction in their labor participation, but find no effects for boys. We also uncover evidence that the gender of the benefit receiver matters for girls’ labor variables: only benefits received by females reduce girls’ work.social security reform, child labor, family, school enrollment, old-age benefits, Brazil

Three-dimensional quantum electrodynamics as an effective interaction

We obtain a Quantum Electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions by applying a Kaluza--Klein type method of dimensional reduction to Quantum Electrodynamics in 3+1 dimensions rendering the model more realistic to application in solid-state systems, invariant under translations in one direction. We show that the model obtained leads to an effective action exhibiting an interesting phase structure and that the generated Chern--Simons term survives only in the broken phase.Comment: 10 pages in Plain Te

The Role of Fermions in Bubble Nucleation

We present a study of the role of fermions in the decay of metastable states of a scalar field via bubble nucleation. We analyze both one and three-dimensional systems by using a gradient expansion for the calculation of the fermionic determinant. The results of the one-dimensional case are compared to the exact results of previous work.Comment: 15 pages, revtex, 9 figure

Characterizing the nature of Fossil Groups with XMM

We present an X-ray follow-up, based on XMM plus Chandra, of six Fossil Group (FG) candidates identified in our previous work using SDSS and RASS data. Four candidates (out of six) exhibit extended X-ray emission, confirming them as true FGs. For the other two groups, the RASS emission has its origin as either an optically dull/X-ray bright AGN, or the blending of distinct X-ray sources. Using SDSS-DR7 data, we confirm, for all groups, the presence of an r-band magnitude gap between the seed elliptical and the second-rank galaxy. However, the gap value depends, up to 0.5mag, on how one estimates the seed galaxy total flux, which is greatly underestimated when using SDSS (relative to Sersic) magnitudes. This implies that many FGs may be actually missed when using SDSS data, a fact that should be carefully taken into account when comparing the observed number densities of FGs to the expectations from cosmological simulations. The similarity in the properties of seed--FG and non-fossil ellipticals, found in our previous study, extends to the sample of X-ray confirmed FGs, indicating that bright ellipticals in FGs do not represent a distinct population of galaxies. For one system, we also find that the velocity distribution of faint galaxies is bimodal, possibly showing that the system formed through the merging of two groups. This undermines the idea that all selected FGs form a population of true fossils.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. Submitted 01/12/2011 to MNRAS, referee report received 21/02/2012, accepted 22/02/201

Weak measurement og the composite Goo-Haenchen shift in the critical region

By using a weak measurement technique, we investigated the interplay between the angular and lateral Goos-Haenchen shift of a focused He-Ne laser beam for incidence near the critical angle. We verified that this interplay dramatically affects the composite Goos-Haenchen shift of the propagated beam. The experimental results confirm theoretical predictions that recently appeared in the literature.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure