I tried to find out in what ways the new edition of the Palgrave economics dictionary is different from the previous one. Then I noticed this amazon review:
"This is evidently a comprehensive and meticulously well-made encyclopedia of economics. There are 8 thick volumes of about 900-1000 pages each. I say "evidently" because, though I have it at hand, nobody on the staff can understand a word of it: it's extremely technical. The articles read like professional economics journals. Here's a sample, from the article on "simulation-based estimation." (Volume 7, p. 503) "As a conclusion, let us stress that indirect inference is able, beyond finite sample biases, to correct for any kind of misspecification bias. The philosophy of this method is basically to estimate a simple model, possibly wrong, to get easily an instrumental estimator beta sub T while a direct estimation of structural parameters theta would have been a daunting task. Therefore what really matters is to use an instrumental parameter that captures the key features of the parameters of interest, while being much simpler to estimate. For instance, Pastorello, Renault and Touzi (2000) and Engle and Lee (1996) have proposed to first estimate a GARCH model as an instrumental model to indirectly recover an estimator of the structural model of interest, a stochastic volatility model much more difficult to estimate directly. Other natural examples are models with latent variables such that an observed variable provides a convenient proxy. An estimator based on this proxy suffers from a misspecification bias, but we end up with a consistent estimator by applying the indirect inference matching." Actually, most of the articles seem to feature complicated, calculus-based equations. I would reproduce them here for your edification but am obviously unable to reproduce equations in an Amazon review. But it's certainly not for the general reader, not even articles you think would be innocuous, such as "GDP" or "Ricardian trade theory." It seemed to me like it was for those who already had or were on the point of having a PhD in economics or econometrics. Ordering this thing for anything less than a university library is a waste of time. For a public library or a high school library, it's going to be way over everybody's head. The thing might be excellent--who knows? I'm just saying I'm not currently nor ever will be in a position to judge. I only write this because we wish we had had such a warning before spending over two grand of our budget on something that nobody here's ever going to use. We thought we were getting a subject-specific encyclopedia, sure -- but meant for a lay reader. Not the case." http://www.amazon.com/New-Palgrave-Dictionary-Economics-Set/dp/0333786769/re f=sr_1_1?s=books <http://www.amazon.com/New-Palgrave-Dictionary-Economics-Set/dp/0333786769/r ef=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376416656&sr=1-1&keywords=New+Palgrave+Dictio nary+of+Economics> &ie=UTF8&qid=1376416656&sr=1-1&keywords=New+Palgrave+Dictionary+of+Economics
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