Compare methods

	Capital Mobility Analysis	Comparative Political Economy
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Regression model	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1963	2001
Originator	Robert Mundell (trilemma); Geoffrey Garrett & Dennis Quinn (political economy)	Comparative politics & political economy tradition (Shonfield, Katzenstein, Hall, Soskice)
Type	Panel regression analysis of policy under capital openness	Macro-comparative research framework
Seminal source	Mundell, R. A. (1963). Capital Mobility and Stabilization Policy under Fixed and Flexible Exchange Rates. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 29(4), 475-485.	Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199247752
Aliases	Capital Account Openness Analysis, Globalization Constraint Analysis, Race to the Bottom Analysis, Policy Autonomy Under Capital Mobility	CPE, Comparative Capitalisms Approach, Macro-Comparative Political Economy, Institutional Political Economy
Related	3	3
Summary	Capital mobility analysis studies how the international mobility of capital constrains — or fails to constrain — national economic policy. Robert Mundell's 1963 work established the open-economy trilemma: a country cannot simultaneously maintain a fixed exchange rate, free capital movement, and an independent monetary policy, and must give up one. The political economy literature, exemplified by Geoffrey Garrett's 1998 Partisan Politics in the Global Economy and Dennis Quinn's 1997 measurement of financial liberalization, asks whether rising capital mobility forces a 'race to the bottom' in taxes and welfare or instead leaves room for partisan and compensatory policy. The empirical method regresses policy or taxation outcomes on measures of capital-account openness — the Quinn index, the Chinn-Ito index — with partisan interactions.	Comparative political economy (CPE) is the subfield that asks how political institutions and markets interact to produce different economic outcomes across capitalist democracies, and the macro-comparative research strategy that subfield employs. Rather than treating the economy as a self-contained system, CPE treats production regimes, labor markets, finance, welfare states, and innovation as politically constructed and institutionally embedded, then compares how distinct national configurations — for instance the liberal market economies and coordinated market economies of Hall and Soskice's varieties-of-capitalism framework — generate systematically different patterns of wages, growth, inequality, and adjustment. The approach combines small-N case comparison and large-N cross-national analysis under a shared institutionalist logic.