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

Antoine Pietri

Journal of Institutional Economics2026https://doi.org/10.1017/s1744137425100398article
AJG 3ABDC B
Weight
0.50

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.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/s1744137425100398

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@article{antoine2026,
  title        = {{Property versus possession, ten years on: assessing the lexical impact of the 2015 JOIE debate}},
  author       = {Antoine Pietri},
  journal      = {Journal of Institutional Economics},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/s1744137425100398},
}

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

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.