Scholarship on varieties of capitalism (VofC) explores the ways in which the institutions structuring the political economy affect patterns of economic performance or policy making and the distribution of well-being. Contesting the claim that there is one best route to superior economic performance, a number of schemas have been proposed to explain why countries have often been able to secure substantial rates of growth in different ways, often with relatively egalitarian distributions of income. Prominent among them is a VofC analysis focused on the developed democracies that distinguishes liberal and coordinated market economies according to the ways in which firms coordinate their endeavors. On the basis of institutional complementarities among subspheres of the political economy, it suggests that the institutional structure of the political economy confers comparative institutional advantages, notably for radical and incremental innovation, which explains why economies have not converged in the context of globalization. Although this framework is contested, it has inspired new research on many subjects, including the basis for innovation, the determinants of social policy, the grounds for international negotiation, and the character of institutional change. In this issue area, there is promising terrain for further research into the origins of varieties of capitalism, the factors that drive institutional change in the political economy, how institutional arrangements in the subspheres of the political economy interact with one another, the normative underlay for capitalism, and the effects of varieties of capitalism on multiple dimensions of well-being.


Keywords:

capitalism;
political economy;
globalization;
politics;
institutional change;
economic growth;
macroeconomics;
innovation;
complementarities;
social policy

Varieties of Capitalism

1. The political economy of skills in comparative-historical perspective 2. The evolution of skill formation in Germany 3. The evolution of skill formation in Britain 4. The evolution of skill formation in Japan and the United States 5. Evolution and change in the German system of vocational training 6. Conclusions, empirical and theoretical.

How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan

I argue that research on organizational configurations has been limited by a mismatch between theory and methods and introduce set-theoretic methods as a viable alternative for overcoming this mismatch. I demonstrate the value of such methods for studying organizational configurations and discuss their applicability for examining equifinality and limited diversity among configurations, as well as their relevance to other research fields such as complementarities theory, complexity theory, and the resource-based view

A set-theoretic approach to organizational configurations

List of Figures ix List of Tables xi Preface xiii CHAPTER ONE Problems of Institutional Analysis 1 CHAPTER TWO The Problem of Change 31 CHAPTER THREE The Problem of Mechanisms 62 CHAPTER FOUR The Problem of Ideas 90 CHAPTER FIVE The Problem of Globalization 124 CHAPTER SIX Where Do W Go from Here? 172 APPENDIX Analysis of Tax Levels and Structures for Country Subgroups 191 References 205 Index 239

http://www.laisumedu.org/desin/imagenescampbell/uno-c.pdf

Institutional change and globalization

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

This article provides a statistical analysis of core contentions of the ‘varieties of capitalism’ perspective on comparative capitalism. The authors construct indices to assess whether patterns of co-ordination in the OECD economies conform to the predictions of the theory and compare the correspondence of institutions across subspheres of the political economy. They test whether institutional complementarities occur across these subspheres by estimating the impact of complementarities in labour relations and corporate governance on growth rates. To assess the durability of varieties of capitalism, they report on the extent of institutional change in the 1980s and 1990s. Powerful interaction effects across institutions in the subspheres of the political economy must be considered if assessments of the economic impact of institutional reform in any one sphere are to be accurate.

/pdf/varieties-of-capitalism-and-institutional-complementarities-4iykrf4ypu.pdf

Varieties of Capitalism and Institutional Complementarities in the Political Economy: An Empirical Analysis

Mit Hilfe von Aggregatdaten analysiert dieses Papier Kernaussagen des "Varieties-of-Capitalism"-Ansatzes. Um beurteilen zu konnen, ob die Aussagen der Theorie mit den institutionellen Begebenheiten liberaler und koordinierter Okonomien ubereinstimmen, konstruieren wir einen landervergleichenden Index der okonomischen Koordination. Wir uberprufen die These von der institutionellen Komplementaritat zwischen den verschiedenen Spharen politischer Okonomien, indem wir das Zusammenwirken von Institutionen analysieren und den Einfluss komplementarer Institutionen der Arbeitsbeziehungen und der Unternehmenskontrolle auf die Hohe von Wachstumsraten untersuchen. Wir diskutieren daruber hinaus, wie stabil die institutionellen Begebenheiten in den vergangenen Jahren waren. Im Ergebnis zeigen sich starke Interaktionseffekte zwischen den Spharen politischer Okonomien, die berucksichtigt werden mussen, um die wirtschaftlichen Wirkungen institutionellen Wandels in einzelnen Spharen zu verstehen.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/19907/1/dp04-5.pdf

Varieties of Capitalism and Institutional Complementarities in the Macroeconomy

An influential body of scholarship argues that corruption behaves as a selffulfilling prophecy. The idea of this work is that levels of corruption emerge endogenously as a result of a society-wide coordination game in which ther individual returns to corrupt behavior are a function of how disposed towards corruption the other members of society are perceived as being. An empirical implication of this logic is that if one were to exogenously perturb beliefs about societal levels of corruption upward, willingness to engage in corruption should increase as a consequence. The current paper evaluates this claim by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large-scale household survey conducted in the Gran Area Metropolitana (GAM) of Costa Rica from October 2013 to April 2014 (n=4200). Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have experienced or directly observed an act of corruption (from 2006 to 2011). The paper finds that, on average, assignment to this display (relative to the control condition) increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to pay a bribe to a police officer by approximately 0. 04 to 0. 08, thereby providing supporting evidence for the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis.

/pdf/corruption-as-a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-evidence-from-a-weuao3s9co.pdf

Corruption as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica

This study presents a survey-based method for conducting inference into the determinants of sensitive political behavior. The approach combines two well-established literatures in statistical methods in the social sciences: the randomized response (RR) methodology utilized to reduce evasive answer bias and the generalized propensity score methodology utilized to draw inferences about causal effects in observational studies. The approach permits one to estimate the causal impact of a multivalued predictor variable of interest on a given sensitive behavior in the face of unknown interaction effects between the predictor and the confounders as well as nonlinearities in the relationship between the confounders and the sensitive behavior. Simulation results point to the superior performance of the RR relative to direct survey questioning using this method for samples of moderate to large size. The utility of the approach is illustrated through an application to corruption in the public bureaucracy in three countries in South America.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/C8A0A40730893FC6755CB050957D5D3C/S1047198700012511a.pdf/div-class-title-understanding-off-the-books-politics-conducting-inference-on-the-determinants-of-sensitive-behavior-with-randomized-response-surveys-div.pdf

Understanding Off-the-Books Politics: Conducting Inference on the Determinants of Sensitive Behavior with Randomized Response Surveys

Studies of the link between state capacity and development often utilize national-level governance indicators to explain fine-grained development outcomes. As capacity in some bureaucratic agencies matters more for these outcomes than capacity in others, this work proxies for capacity within the set of relevant agencies by using a measure of ‘mean’ capacity across all agencies in a polity. This practice is problematic for two reasons: (1) within-country, cross-agency diversity in capacity often overwhelms the variation encountered across public sectors considered in their entireties; (2) national-level reputations for capacity are not particularly informative about differences in capacity in functionally equivalent agencies in different countries. The article draws on the author's survey of public employees in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile to establish these points.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0007123412000403

Daniel W. Gingerich

Papers

Varieties of Capitalism and Institutional Complementarities in the Political Economy: An Empirical Analysis

Varieties of Capitalism and Institutional Complementarities in the Macroeconomy

Corruption as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica

Understanding Off-the-Books Politics: Conducting Inference on the Determinants of Sensitive Behavior with Randomized Response Surveys

Governance Indicators and the Level of Analysis Problem: Empirical Findings from South America