Studying financial market regulation appears to be the thing to do this fall. A Delaware Republican, Representative Michael Castle, has introduced legislation that would create a new panel to study hedge funds and whether they should be more tightly regulated. A separate, private group, comprising a star-studded set of economists, lawyers, and businessmen, has formed a committee to take a broader view of business regulation in America. The former will prove, at best, an irrelevancy if it even gets off the ground, but the latter is exciting indeed. Nearly five years after Enron’s collapse sparked a wave of corporate scandals, the country is still long overdue for a serious discussion of the right way to go about corporate regulation.

Congressman Castle’s scheme would not be the first time a government panel was formed to study hedge funds. One last considered the pros and cons of hedge fund regulation in the wake of the demise of the Long-Term Capital Management fund. That Clinton-appointed commission concluded that more discipline on the part of creditors, and not more regulation of hedge funds themselves, was the best way to avert future problems. If Mr. Castle’s panel were to return a result like that, it might help take some of the wind out of the sails of the regulation-or-bust crowd. But that possible benefit comes at the risk that such a panel would find itself pushing for more regulation.

More likely to yield dividends is a recently formed group co-chaired by Glenn Hubbard of Columbia and John Thornton of the Brookings Institution and directed by Hal S. Scott of Harvard Law School. The committee, styled the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, includes heavy hitters like President Bush’s first-term Commerce Secretary, Donald Evans, leveraged-buyout magnate Wilbur Ross, and Dupont chief executive Charles O. Holliday, to name but a few. Their self-appointed mission is to offer suggestions on how to structure business regulation to make America more competitive.

Mr. Hubbard’s panel is noteworthy mainly for the breadth of its investigating. To be sure, the committee will tackle the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, and especially Section 404 of “Sarbox,” which sets onerous new requirements for internal controls that are strangling many small companies. But the scholars and businessmen will do so much more. The barriers to American competitiveness extend beyond Sarbox, Mr. Scott is at pains to tell us.

Securities class-action reform is toward the top of the list. Twice in the 1990s, Congress flirted with reform in this field although each effort ultimately fell short. While the demise of perennial class-action plaintiffs’ firm Milberg Weiss appears to be putting a dent in new litigation, America is still competing against countries like Britain and Australia that offer more protections. A London-based company operates in a loser-pays system where plaintiffs have to shoulder the company’s legal costs if a suit is unsuccessful; the system is a natural deterrent to frivolous litigation. In Australia, the lead plaintiffs and their lawyers in a class action face a similar threat if they lose.

The committee is also expected to consider America’s regulatory process itself. In Britain, financial regulators undertake not just a cost-benefit analysis of a proposed rule but also weigh how implementing it would affect Britain’s ability to attract new business. Yet America’s Securities and Exchange Commission, at least under its previous management, has often struggled with even basic cost-benefit calculations. The SEC’s mutual fund rule was quashed twice by an appeals court because the SEC hadn’t done any such analysis at all.

The committee is a purely private undertaking, although it has won the endorsement of Treasury Secretary Paulson. Its recommendations are two months away, and even then any report would face an uncertain future in a Congress that knows too little about business and too much about regulating. It speaks volumes about the seriousness of the problem, however, that so many businessmen and scholars who would ordinarily have so many things to do are taking their own time to address regulatory reform.