In this New Year preview of the publishers' catalogues, it's the turn of the Oxford University Press's highlights. Writing about a new Encyclopedia and Dictionary as I am at the moment, it's right to point out that the OUP has a large number of reference guides and companions. These are different kinds of animal, with a deeper focus on narrower areas of the subject. There's a new Handbook of Rational and Social Choice just out, and this month the Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality. A related title out in May is Debates in the Measurement of Global Poverty, edited by Anand, Segal and Stiglitz. April brings the Oxford Handbook of Banking. Still on the reference theme, the OUP's Very Short Guides are obviously very successful, although I have a few and am never sure who would either read them through (because they're not narratives) or refer to them (because they are very short – no doubt this is the right length for the short attention span generation). I can't spot any forthcoming economics titles in this series, however.
Other new titles include two volumes emerging from the IFS's Mirrlees Review on 21st century tax, Tax By Design and Dimensions of Tax Design; Industrial Policy and Development, edited by Giovanni Dosi and Mario Cimoli; Business in Britain in the 20th Century, edited by Richard Coopey and Peter Lyth; and several on health economics due in the spring and summer. There's also a Festschrift in honour of the marvellous econometrician David Hendry, The Methodology and Practice of Econometrics, edited by Jennifer Castle and Neil Shephard, due in June. This is another form of book I very much enjoy – the format often seems to liberate the contributors to think around a subject quite creatively. I wonder what others think about this?
Finally, it's well worth flagging up quite a few new or forthcoming paperback editions, all I think well worth picking up now if you haven't read them already: Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion; Roger Ridell's Does Foreign Aid Really Work; William Easterly's White Man's Burden; Robert Shiller's Macro Markets; Avner Offer's The Challenge of Affluence; the late Andrew Glyn's Capitalism Unleashed; China, Fragile Superpower by Susan Shirk; Bernard Van Praag and Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell's Happiness Quantified; and Ranald Michie's The Global Securities Market. (The last two of these rather less aimed at the general audience.)
And finally, finally, I'd like to flag up my friend Ed Glaeser's excellent Lindahl Lectures, Cities, Agglomeration and Spatial Equilibrium, even though it was out last July and so doesn't strictly qualify as new.
Back to the reference theme later today when I speak to the editors of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.