Short answers, pulled from the story.
The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics is a twenty-volume reference work on economics published by Palgrave Macmillan. The 2018 third edition contains around 3,000 entries written by prominent economists, including 36 winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Articles are classified according to Journal of Economic Literature classification codes.
The first edition, published in 1987 under the title The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, was edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman. It contained 927 contributors, 655 biographies, and 1,300 subject entries across four volumes.
Reviewing the 1987 edition for the New York Times, Robert M. Solow concluded that the New Palgrave is a dictionary only in a very special sense. He praised articles by Robert J. Aumann on game theory and by Stephen Ross and Robert Merton on financial economics, but noted that most articles would be inaccessible to non-economists, including undergraduate liberal arts students.
R. H. Inglis Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, published in three volumes from 1894 to 1899, was the forerunner of the New Palgrave. The initial contractual agreement with publisher Macmillan and Co. was dated 1888, and an appendix was added to Volume III in 1908. A revised edition edited by Henry Higgs appeared in 1923-1926.
Robert Solow criticized the 1987 edition for giving excessive space to Marxist economics, Austrian economists, Post-Keynesians, and neo-Ricardians relative to their standing in the profession. George Stigler argued that a nonprofessional reader would never guess that economists in the Marxian-Sraffian tradition represented a small minority with virtually no impact on professional work in major English-language universities.
The fourth edition is scheduled for publication in 2027, under the editorship of Jayati Ghosh, Esteban Perez Caldentey, and Matias Vernengo. J. Barkley Rosser Jr. had been listed as a co-editor until his death.