Kota Kitagawa (2024)

Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Online first.

Abstract. This article presents a review of Christian Bessy’s book Expropriation by Law, Edward Elgar, 2023. It is a rare and unique book that analyzes financialization from the institutional change approach elaborated by French institutionalism known as the Economics of Convention. We tend to think of patents as merely one of the increasingly fluidized rights in the trend toward securitization. However, Bessy convinces that the growing importance of intellectual property rights is not a minor and collateral consequence of financialization. In the eight chapters of his book he abductively creates and demonstrates the following thesis: the interactions among the legal intermediaries on patents have been a significant driving force of financialization because it has driven the reformation of business and financial management in corporations. This, he writes, has led to the current linkage between the corporations and the stock market. In this review two issues from the book from the perspective of the original American institutionalist John R. Commons are highlighted. First, the book focuses on the characteristics of the entrepreneur of the intermediaries that affect the reformations of internal, external, and collective aspects of public and private going concerns. This is by way of transforming conventions for patent valuations. Second, the book links financialization with the transformation of employment institutions under the proposition of endogenous dynamics of law driven by legal intermediaries.

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