We use bank-, loan- and firm-level data together with a quasi-natural experiment to estimate the impact of capital requirement reductions on bank lending and real economic outcomes. We find that capital requirement reductions increase lending both to households and firms at the bank- and...

We study efficiency properties of competitive economies in which banks provide liquidity insurance and interact on secondary asset markets. While all banks are subject to extrinsic risk, a bank's portfolio choice determines whether it is prone to a bank run in one of the extrinsic states. Asset...

This paper empirically examines how capital affects a bank's performance (survival and market share), and how this effect varies across banking crises, market crises, and normal times that occurred in the U.S. over the past quarter century. We have two main results. First, capital helps small...