Fiscal policy in the context of varieties of capitalism

In the recent literature the impact of institutional variables on macroeconomic policy outcomes has been largely ignored. However one particular strand of the political economy has lately shed some light on the relationship between fiscal policy and its effects on economic growth by distinguishing the type of capitalism which characterizes developed countries. In this paper I will follow this so-called Varieties of Capitalism approach to examine the question, whether fiscal policy in liberal market economies is more effective than in non-liberal ones due to institutional complementarities. For this purpose I rely on a mixed-methodology, first using vector autoregressive models to determine fiscal multipliers across 19 OECD countries, before investigating by which institutional factors expansionary fiscal effects might be influenced. Indeed, significant difference in the size of the multiplier between the two production regimes can be found. However, the obtained results seem exactly to contradict my expectations