Property versus possession, ten years on: assessing the lexical impact of the 2015 JOIE debate

Antoine Pietri ()
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Antoine Pietri: CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement - Institut Agro Montpellier - Institut Agro - Institut national d'enseignement supérieur pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement - UM - Université de Montpellier

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Abstract: This Comment assesses the legacy of the 2015 JOIE debate, critiquing the economic conflation of de jure 'property' and de facto 'possession'. Citation analysis confirms the debate's sustained intellectual footprint, but this did not translate into the lexical shift advocated by its proponents. A text-mining analysis of 58 economics journals finds negligible adoption of the specific term 'possession'. A broader test for a conceptual basket of related de facto terms also fails to find robust evidence; a fragile signal in one dataset, not replicated in a second. We conclude that no significant, profession-wide lexical adoption occurred.

Keywords: Legal institutionalism possession property rights; Legal institutionalism; possession; property rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Published in Journal of Institutional Economics, 2026, 22, ⟨10.1017/S1744137425100398⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05486487

DOI: 10.1017/S1744137425100398

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