Laura Cavalli

Bio: Laura Cavalli is an academic researcher from Eni. The author has contributed to research in topics: Sustainable development & Fertility. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 40 publications receiving 329 citations. Previous affiliations of Laura Cavalli include University of Verona & Catholic University of the Sacred Heart.

The Effects of Air Pollution on COVID-19 Related Mortality in Northern Italy.

Abstract: Long-term exposure to ambient air pollutant concentrations is known to cause chronic lung inflammation, a condition that may promote increased severity of COVID-19 syndrome caused by the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). In this paper, we empirically investigate the ecologic association between long-term concentrations of area-level fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and excess deaths in the first quarter of 2020 in municipalities of Northern Italy. The study accounts for potentially spatial confounding factors related to urbanization that may have influenced the spreading of SARS-CoV-2 and related COVID-19 mortality. Our epidemiological analysis uses geographical information (e.g., municipalities) and negative binomial regression to assess whether both ambient PM2.5 concentration and excess mortality have a similar spatial distribution. Our analysis suggests a positive association of ambient PM2.5 concentration on excess mortality in Northern Italy related to the COVID-19 epidemic. Our estimates suggest that a one-unit increase in PM2.5 concentration (µg/m3) is associated with a 9% (95% confidence interval: 6-12%) increase in COVID-19 related mortality.

The Effect of Couple Disagreement about Child‐Timing Intentions: A Parity‐Specific Approach

Abstract: Using couple data from a longitudinal study conducted in Italy, a country with persistently low fertility levels, we examined the effect of partners' discrepant child-timing intentions on reproductive behavior. We found that the effect of couple disagreement on subsequent fertility is parity-specific and does not depend on whether only the male or the female partner intends to have a(nother) child. The disagreement tends to produce an intermediate childbearing outcome at parities zero and one, while the outcome is shifted more toward agreement on not having a(nother) child at parity two. The empirical evidence suggests that gender equality in reproductive decisionmaking is not driven by partners' equal bargaining power or partners' equal access to economic resources. The findings indicate that the predictive power of child-timing intentions strongly improves if both partners' views are considered in fertility models, and thus support the adoption of couple analysis in fertility research.

Delayed First Birth and New Mothers’ Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Biological Fertility Shocks

Abstract: We investigate the impact of delaying the first birth on Italian mothers’ labor market outcomes around childbirth. The effect of postponing motherhood is identified using biological fertility shocks; namely, the occurrence of miscarriages and stillbirths. Focusing on mothers’ behavior around the first birth, our study is able to isolate the effect of motherhood postponement from that of total fertility. Our estimates suggest that delaying the first birth by 1 year raises the likelihood of participating in the labor market by 1.2 % points and weekly working time by about half an hour, while we do not find any evidence that late motherhood prevents worsening of new mothers’ job conditions (the so-called “mommy track”). Our findings are robust to a number of sensitivity checks, among which are controls for partners’ characteristics and a proxy for maternal health status.

Couples' childbearing behaviour in Italy: which of the partners is leading it?

Abstract: Using data on 2356 Italian couples from the longitudinal survey on Family and Social Subjects conducted between 2003 and 2007, we examine the relationship between child-timing intentions and subsequent reproductive outcomes. Our hypothesis is that in Italy the lack of agreement between partners has an inhibiting effect on couple’s pregnancy-seeking behaviour because inertia and social norms favour the partner who does not want to have a(nother) child. We find that this holds true only for couples who have already two or more children whereas at lower parities conflicting intentions result in either a middle fertility outcome or childbearing levels similar to those observed for couples who agree on having a child. Women have a greater influence on childbearing decisions than men. The explicit consideration of a partner’s disagreement increases the predictive accuracy of fertility intentions. Our findings strongly support the adoption of a couple-oriented approach in fertility research.

An Analysis of Reproductive Intentions of Italian Couples

Abstract: This study aims at analysing the process of family formation by adopting a couple's perspective. Using household-level micro data, we examine the determinants of the partners' (contrasting) fertility intentions for the first and the second child. Italy is characterized by a high discrepancy between desired and actual fertility. There is a predominance of traditional gender roles and a lack of policy measures helping parents combine family and working life. Our main hypothesis is that, in Italy, couples in which the female partner has a higher education than the male partner are particularly exposed to a conflict, especially if the male intends to have a child. The same is assumed for working women. Moreover, we suppose that some levels of conflict emerge when women are unsatisfied with the gender division of childcare responsibilities and other family chores. When the couple's intentions to have a second child are considered, our findings are mostly consistent with the assumptions made.

A Treatise on the Family

Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

Spatial variation of PM2.5, PM10, PM2.5 absorbance and PMcoarse concentrations between and within 20 European study areas and the relationship with NO2 - Results of the ESCAPE project

Abstract: Abstract The ESCAPE study (European Study of Cohorts for Air Pollution Effects) investigates relationships between long-term exposure to outdoor air pollution and health using cohort studies across Europe. This paper analyses the spatial variation of PM 2.5 , PM 2.5 absorbance, PM 10 and PM coarse concentrations between and within 20 study areas across Europe. We measured NO 2 , NO x , PM 2.5 , PM 2.5 absorbance and PM 10 between October 2008 and April 2011 using standardized methods. PM coarse was determined as the difference between PM 10 and PM 2.5 . In each of the twenty study areas, we selected twenty PM monitoring sites to represent the variability in important air quality predictors, including population density, traffic intensity and altitude. Each site was monitored over three 14-day periods spread over a year, using Harvard impactors. Results for each site were averaged after correcting for temporal variation using data obtained from a reference site, which was operated year-round. Substantial concentration differences were observed between and within study areas. Concentrations for all components were higher in Southern Europe than in Western and Northern Europe, but the pattern differed per component with the highest average PM 2.5 concentrations found in Turin and the highest PM coarse in Heraklion. Street/urban background concentration ratios for PM coarse (mean ratio 1.42) were as large as for PM 2.5 absorbance (mean ratio 1.38) and higher than those for PM 2.5 (1.14) and PM 10 (1.23), documenting the importance of non-tailpipe emissions. Correlations between components varied between areas, but were generally high between NO 2 and PM 2.5 absorbance (average R 2 = 0.80). Correlations between PM 2.5 and PM coarse were lower (average R 2 = 0.39). Despite high correlations, concentration ratios between components varied, e.g. the NO 2 /PM 2.5 ratio varied between 0.67 and 3.06. In conclusion, substantial variability was found in spatial patterns of PM 2.5 , PM 2.5 absorbance, PM 10 and PM coarse . The highly standardized measurement of particle concentrations across Europe will contribute to a consistent assessment of health effects across Europe.

Epidermal growth factor receptor

Abstract: EGFR and Lung Cancer “When I began my postdoc in Harold Varmus’ lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2004, EGFR kinase domain mutations had been discovered in lung adenocarcinoma patients,” said Udayan Guha, M.D., Ph.D., Investigator in CCR’s Thoracic and Gastrointestinal Oncology Branch. “Companies were developing drugs against EGFR and expecting that all patients would respond.” Unfortunately, only approximately 10 percent of lung cancer patients responded to tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) in the United States, and while those responses were striking early on, they soon led to relapse and drug resistance. Efforts ensued to sequence EGFR in tumors, and multiple mutations in the kinase domain were discovered. Guha wanted to know why tumors were so dependent on EGFR signaling and what was happening downstream of the wild-type receptor and of the different mutant receptors, and in response to TKIs, which target EGFR. He began looking at patterns of phosphorylation of proteins. “I started my own lab at CCR in 2011, and I continued to work on EGFR-dependent phosphorylation in human lung carcinoma cell lines. My lab has worked with first, second, and now third generation TKIs,” said Guha. “We are trying to discover the differences between sensitive and resistant cells, and also how the dynamics of phosphorylation change with TKI treatment. Our overall goal is to identify actionable targets to overcome drug resistance.” Guha and his colleagues use mass spectrometry to identify phosphorylated proteins and to quantify the degree of phosphorylation as an initial unbiased proteomics screen for studying EGFR signaling. Using this approach, his team recently identified the protein MIG-6 as a suppressor of EGFR. They found it was constitutively phosphorylated on two particular tyrosine residues in cells engineered to express cancercausing mutations of EGFRs; with the Inhibiting the