DAVID S. EVANS, University College London, University of Chicago Law School
Email: david.evans@esapience.org
JOSHUA D. WRIGHT, George Mason University School of Law
Email: jwrightg@gmu.edu

As part of its overhaul of financial services regulation the Obama Administration has proposed stronger protection of consumers of financial products and services. The Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009 (CFPA Act), which the Administration submitted to the U.S. Congress on June 30, 2009, would result in a sweeping overhaul of consumer financial protection. The CFPA Act would create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) which would assume the responsibility for enforcing most existing consumer financial protection laws from other federal banking regulators as well as the Federal Trade Commission. The CFPA would have significant additional powers to regulate consumer financial products, mandate disclosures, and require covered businesses to offer consumers "plain vanilla" products that the CFPA would design. The legislation would limit federal preemption of nationally chartered financial institutions by allowing states and localities to have stronger restrictions than those adopted by the CFPA and would add a new prohibition against "abusive" practices while allowing new interpretations of existing liability for unfair and deceptive practices. This article details how the CFPA Act would change consumer financial regulation, explores the policy rationale for these changes, and examines how the legislation, if enacted in its current form, would affect providers and consumers of financial products and services.

MICHAEL D. DIATHESOPOULOS, University of Glasgow, Scool of Law
Email: diathessopoulos@yahoo.gr

Management Contracts are a type of contract, whose content and legal purpose is the contractual transfer of corporate management from its board of directors to a third party, usually another corporation. Management Contracts are used by corporations as a method to succeed international growth, to transfer know-how, to achieve or sell corporate efficiency, to conceal some business activities and to gain the control of another corporation without participating in its capital. We conduct a comparative analysis of Management Contracts Regulation in three jurisdictions: USA, UK and Germany. The purpose of the paper is to show that management contracts, although facing some distrust, continue to grow and become acceptable by different legal orders. However, in all three jurisdictions examined, severe restraints and limitations are posed before the recognition of a management contract as valid.

OSCAR COUWENBERG, University of Groningen - Faculty of Law - Department of Law and Economics
Email: o.couwenberg@rug.nl
STEPHEN J. LUBBEN, Seton Hall University - School of Law
Email: lubbenst@shu.edu

In this paper we adopt a new approach to the issue and contextualize the cost of chapter 11 by comparison to the costs of business bankruptcy in the Netherlands. Using unique data-sets that each author has developed in connection with other projects, we match a group of comparable cases from each jurisdiction. The results not only contextualize chapter 11 by reference to a comparable international economy, but also provide important comparative insights.

Most importantly, we find that "law matters." In particular, because the two jurisdictions consider the cost of corporate reorganization in different ways - chapter 11 includes almost all professional costs incurred during the case to be chapter 11 costs, whereas the Netherlands considers a narrower range of professionals - the difference in jurisdictions is initially the most important factor in explaining the cost of reorganization. We then account for these legal distinctions, and find that economic factors like the size of the debtor and the degree to which the firm's debts are secured explain most of the cost of corporate bankruptcy - irrespective of jurisdiction.