| | |  | Video | Home » » The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (8 Volume Set) | | | | | | | Description: | | The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics is established as the leading reference work in the field. The second edition will retain many individual classic essays of enduring importance from its predecessor and include one thousand new or heavily revised articles. Written by over 1,500 eminent contributors, the Dictionary will contain 1,900 articles and 5.7million words. Published in eight print volumes and for the first time in online format bringing substantial benefits to users, the second edition will be the definitive scholarly reference work for a new generation of economists. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Steven N. Durlauf | | Hardcover:
| 7344 pages | | Publisher:
| Palgrave Macmillan | | Publication Date:
| May 15, 2008 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0333786769 | | Package Length:
| 15.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 10.8 inches | | Package Height:
| 10.4 inches | | Package Weight:
| 38.8 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 1 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
we blew our budget on this -- and for what?Aug 04, 2009
I'm not sure what to rate this: nobody here can understand a word.
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 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 na 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.
| | |
|
