Teaching with the "Biagi Law" Data

• In Memory of Marco Biagi
• An Analysis of the "Biagi Law" (PDF)
• Italian data:   CSV file   R script   Gretl data
• OECD data:   CSV file   R script   Gretl data
• why this is important to me

Dear Students,

I want to teach you how to measure the effect of employment protection on employment outcomes. The choice of topic is personal, but my goal is to teach you econometrics. And I think this dataset will help you learn econometrics.

The "Biagi Law" dataset gives me a streamlined way of teaching statistics and econometrics because it covers a lot of topics. With this single dataset, I can teach you probability distributions, odds ratios, heteroskedascity, serial correlation, spatial correlation and panel data.

As a teaching tool, the "Biagi Law" dataset works well in the classroom because the dataset itself is quite limited. All it contains are male and female employment rates by region from 1997 to 2014 and the Italian inflation rate over the same period. That simplicity will help you quickly learn regression analysis.

Then we will examine a richer dataset. The "Biagi Law" dataset is a great introduction to the OECD's Employment Protection Legislation data, which explores the same economic question, but contains more variables and more detailed variables.

And once again, we will ask what effect employment protection has on employment outcomes.

- Eryk Wdowiak

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