A central tenet of the international business (IB) literature is that institutions matter (Dunning & Lundan, 2008b; Peng, Wang, & Jiang, 2008; Peng, Sun, Pinkham, & Chen, 2009). In particular, institutional differences across countries can help explain the existence of “country effects” as determinants of differential firm performance (Bamiatzi, Bozos, Cavusgil, & Hult, 2016; Gao, Murray, Kotabe, & Lu, 2010; Makino, Isobe, & Chan, 2004) as well as location (Bevan, Estrin, & Meyer, 2004; Bénassy-Quéré, Coupet, & Mayer, 2007; Globerman & Shapiro, 2002) and entry mode choices by multinational firms (Brouthers, 2002; Meyer, Estrin, Bhaumik & Peng, 2009). These institutional differences have arguably become more important as emerging markets add heterogeneity to the institutional spectrum (Hoskisson, Wright, Filatotchev, & Peng, 2013; Peng et al., 2008). At the same time, there is a long intellectual history built around the analysis of the performance effects of economic systems: groupings of countries that share similar institutional characteristics (Koopmans & Montias 1971; Ostrom, 2009). One prominent example is the Varieties of Capitalism (VOC) perspective (Hall & Soskice, 2001) where it is argued that even within a single economic system, capitalism, countries could usefully be grouped in typologies based on institutional similarities, resulting in a “remarkable convergence on just a few configurations (Boyer, 2005, p. 13). Hall and Soskice looked at a relatively small group of developed economies in North America and Europe and identified two main variants of capitalism, Liberal Market (LME) and Coordinated Market (CME) economies. Importantly, in their approach, the two systems can generate the same levels of national and company performance, resulting in an outcome termed equifinality. Subsequent scholarship on capitalist variety relies less on establishing typologies such as the VOC, and more on the development of empirically derived taxonomies of institutional systems (Hall & Gingerich, 2009; Schneider & Paunescu, 2012; Witt & Redding, 2013). To date, most scholars have restricted their analysis to developed countries, where institutions are stronger and arguably have a different impact from those in emerging markets (Peng et al., 2008). The major exception is Fainshmidt, Judge, Aguilera, and Smith (henceforth FJAS, 2016) who exploit known features of institutional structures in understudied emerging and developing countries to create a novel framework, which they refer to as Varieties of Institutional Systems (VIS). FJAS’s focus on understudied countries is a welcome addition to the literature on capitalist variety, as scholars have criticized the VOC for its almost exclusive focus on mature OECD member economies (Allen, 2004). The VIS taxonomy consists of seven distinct, empirically derived national institutional systems, henceforth termed configurations, and incorporates factors considered to be relevant to the emerging market context such as the role of the state and diversified family business groups (Estrin, Meyer, Nielsen, & Nielsen, 2016; Carney, Van Essen, Estrin, & Shapiro, 2017). However, to date, the performance implications of these systems have not been addressed.