Pension, Fertility, and Education

A pay-as-you-go pension scheme is associated with positive externalities of having children and providing them with human capital. In a framework with heterogeneity in productivity, and stochastic and endogenous investment in fertility and education, we discuss internalization policies associated with child benefits in the pension formula. The second-best scheme displays both a benefit contingent on the contributions of children and a purely fertility-related component.pay-as-you-go, fertility, human capital, externalities

Operator space structure and amenability for Fig\`a-Talamanca-Herz algebras

Column and row operator spaces - which we denote by COL and ROW, respectively - over arbitrary Banach spaces were introduced by the first-named author; for Hilbert spaces, these definitions coincide with the usual ones. Given a locally compact group $G$ and $p,p' \in (1,\infty)$ with $\frac{1}{p} + \frac{1}{p'} = 1$, we use the operator space structure on $CB(COL(L^{p'}(G)))$ to equip the Figa-Talamanca-Herz algebra $A_p(G)$ with an operator space structure, turning it into a quantized Banach algebra. Moreover, we show that, for $p \leq q \leq 2$ or $2 \leq q \leq p$ and amenable $G$, the canonical inclusion $A_q(G) \subset A_p(G)$ is completely bounded (with cb-norm at most $K_G^2$, where $K_G$ is Grothendieck's constant). As an application, we show that $G$ is amenable if and only if $A_p(G)$ is operator amenable for all - and equivalently for one - $p \in (1,\infty)$; this extends a theorem by Z.-J. Ruan.Comment: 25 pages; some minor, hopefully clarifying revision

Freeness of equivariant cohomology and mutants of compactified representations

We survey generalisations of the Chang-Skjelbred Lemma for integral coefficients. Moreover, we construct examples of manifolds with actions of tori of rank > 2 whose equivariant cohomology is torsion-free, but not free. This answers a question of Allday's. The "mutants" we construct are obtained from compactified representations and involve Hopf bundles in a crucial way.Comment: 11 pages; more details on the smooth structure of the mutants; other, minor change

Impact of vibrational entropy on the stability of unsolvated peptide helices with increasing length

Helices are a key folding motif in protein structure. The question which factors determine helix stability for a given polypeptide or protein is an ongoing challenge. Here we use van der Waals corrected density-functional theory to address a part of this question in a bottom-up approach. We show how intrinsic helical structure is stabilized with length and temperature for a series of experimentally well studied unsolvated alanine based polypeptides, Ac-Alan-LysH+. By exploring extensively the conformational space of these molecules, we find that helices emerge as the preferred structure in the length range n=4-8 not just due to enthalpic factors (hydrogen bonds and their cooperativity, van der Waals dispersion interactions, electrostatics), but importantly also by a vibrational entropic stabilization over competing conformers at room temperature. The stabilization is shown to be due to softer low-frequency vibrational modes in helical conformers than in more compact ones. This observation is corroborated by including anharmonic effects explicitly through \emph{ab initio} molecular dynamics, and generalized by testing different terminations and considering larger helical peptide models

Steenrod squares on conjugation spaces

We prove that the coefficients of the so-called conjugation equation for conjugation spaces in the sense of Hausmann-Holm-Puppe are completely determined by Steenrod squares. This generalises a result of V.A. Krasnov for certain complex algebraic varieties. It also leads to a generalisation of a formula given by Borel and Haefliger, thereby largely answering an old question of theirs in the affirmative.Comment: 4 page

Thermodynamic equilibrium conditions of graphene films on SiC

First-principles surface phase diagrams reveal that epitaxial monolayer graphene films on the Si side of 3C-SiC(111) can exist as thermodynamically stable phases in a narrow range of experimentally controllable conditions, defining a path to the highest-quality graphene films. Our calculations are based on a van der Waals corrected density functional. The full, experimentally observed (6 sqrt(3)x 6 sqrt(3))-R30 supercells for zero- to trilayer graphene are essential to describe the correct interface geometries and the relative stability of surface phases and possible defects