Susan Block-Lieb

Consumer credit card use: the roles of creditor disclosure and anticipated emotion.

In response to federal legislative reform aimed, in part, at reducing consumer bankruptcy filings, the authors conducted 2 experiments examining the role of affect in purchasing behavior. In Experiment 1, they examined consumer debtors, and in Experiment 2, they examined nondebtors. In both experiments, they investigated purchasing decisions made during a simulated online shopping trip, with some participants receiving standard disclosures of interest rates and money owed and with other participants receiving information under the new enhanced disclosure regulations. Results demonstrated support for the influence of anticipated affect in credit card use among both debtors and nondebtors and indicated that anticipated emotion may moderate the impact of the enhanced disclosure regulations.

Contemporary issues in consumer bankruptcy

Contents: Johanna Niemi: Never too Small to Fail: Insolvency of Consumers as an International Concern - Nick Huls/Nadja Jungman: Regulation and Self-regulation in the Fight against Over-indebtedness in the Netherlands: A Socio-legal and Economic Analysis - Annina Persson: The New Swedish Debt Relief Act - Georg E. Kodek: Fourteen Years of Consumer Bankruptcy in Austria - Michelle Kelly-Louw: South African Homeowners Are Not Protected against Various Interest Rates Hikes - Souichiroun Kozuka: Punishing the Lender for Whos Sake? Impacts of the New Case Law and Follow-ups to the 2006 Reform of the Consumer Credit Regulation in Japan - Michael Knobloch: Unemployment and Over-indebtedness in Germany - Claudia Abreu Lopes/ Catarina Frade/Fernanda Jesus: The Ultimate Victims of the Economic Crisis: A Portrait of Portuguese Overburdened Families - Eva Munster/Ulrike Zier/ Heiko Ruger/Stephan Letzel: Over-indebtedness, Health and Social Network - Stephanie Ben-Ishai/Saul Schwartz/Jeremy Barretto: The Role of Government as a Creditor of the Disadvantaged.

Who Governs? Delegations in Global Trade Lawmaking

Who governs international trade law regimes? Although this question has attracted much research for global regulatory regimes, very little is known about international trade law organizations which function as global legislatures. This paper focuses on hitherto invisible attributes of the inner core of global legislators - the state and non-state delegations and delegations that create global norms for private international trade law through the most prominent global trade legislature, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). Based on ten years of fieldwork, extensive interviews, and unique data on delegation attendance and participation in UNCITRAL’s Working Group on Insolvency, the paper positions the empirical question of delegation attributes within broader theories of global norm-making and specifies these with respect to several hypotheses. The data show that the inner core of global trade lawmakers at UNCITRAL represents a tiny and unrepresentative subset of state and non-state actors. This disjunction between UNCITRAL’s public face, which accords with a global norm of democratic governance, and its private face, where dominant states and private interests prevail, creates potential problems of legitimacy for UNCITRAL and the probable adoption and implementation of its trade law products.