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. …

A Treatise on the Family

Live longer, work longer

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.

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

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

Epidermal growth factor receptor

Health and economic impact of air pollution in the states of India: the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

The following Policy Brief proposes a qualitative analysis on the impact the COVID-19 pandemic and the current Italian crisis could have on the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The analysis considers all the 169 targets of the 2030 Agenda, in order to study, specifically, which will be the effects of the crisis concerning the three dimensions of sustainable development: economy, society and environment. The reflection emerging from this document attempts to understand for each Goal and target which could and can be the impacts of the pandemic, of the lockdown and of the overall economic crisis caused by the previous. The results presented in the Brief are based on the evolution of the crisis and on the decree-laws of the Italian government in order to contain it; nevertheless, those outcomes cannot be taken as final, considering the subsisting nature of the crisis, the still outstanding lockdown measures, and the absence of quantitative data related to the post-crisis.

COVID-19 & SDGs: Does the Current Pandemic Have an Impact on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals? A Qualitative Analysis

Shift e switch da farmaci etici a prodotti senza obbligo di prescrizione: potenzialità ed effetti

We study the determinants of redistribution at the municipal level in the context of public childcare in Italy. Within a substantially homogeneous legislative framework, different municipalities autonomously define how participation fees vary with a compound indicator of income and wealth (ISEE), thus redistributing resources across households using the service. The nearly one hundred municipalities we take into account exhibit wide heterogeneity in redistributive attitudes. We find statistically significant correlations of these with a number of individual characteristics of policy-makers and municipalities, but not with those of the ex-ante distribution of income, which should be central according to both normative and positive theory. Since the price of public childcare is subsidized, resources are also redistributed from tax-payers to users. The evidence that we find is consistent with the hypothesis that this type of redistribution is a public good.

Redistribution at the Local Level: The Case of Public Childcare in Italy

The paper presents a large scale overlapping generation model with heterogeneous agents, where the family is the decision unit. We calibrate the model for three European countries - France, Italy and Sweden - which show marked differences in the design of some public programs. We examine the properties in terms of annual and lifetime redistribution of a number of tax-benefit programs, by studying the impact of removing from our model economies some or all of them. We find that whether one considers a life-cycle or an annual horizon, and whether behavioral responses are accounted for or not, has a large impact on the results. The model may provide useful insights for policy makers on which kind of reforms are more likely to achieve specific equity objectives.

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Laura Cavalli

Papers

COVID-19 & SDGs: Does the Current Pandemic Have an Impact on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals? A Qualitative Analysis

Shift e switch da farmaci etici a prodotti senza obbligo di prescrizione: potenzialità ed effetti

Redistribution at the Local Level: The Case of Public Childcare in Italy

Public policies over the life cycle: a large scale OLG model for France, Italy and Sweden

The impact of EU Structural Funds on the national sustainable development strategy: a methodological application