Bank capital requirements would entail large social costs if they made resource allocation suboptimal and banking services costly by unduly limiting the banks' ability to lend. This paper considers three main factors that may make capital requirements relevant, namely, deposit insurance...

We provide a welfare comparison of the two types of banking regulation commonly used to address moral hazard problems, deposit rate ceilings and minimum capital requirements. It is well understood that interference with the price mechanism may lead to inefficiencies -- in the case of a deposit...