Recent literature suggests that higher capital requirements for banks might lead to a socially costly crowding out of deposits by equity. This paper shows that additional equity in banks can help to crowd in deposits. Intuitively, as banks have more equity and become safer, the cost of deposit funding may decline; this, in turn, can encourage banks to expand their deposits. However, I also find that, for this effect to occur, capital requirements may have to be stringent enough: When bank capital is low, a small rise in capital requirements can cause banks to substitute equity for deposits. Overall, a non-monotonic relationship between the required amount of equity in banks and their level of deposit funding obtains.

Conventional wisdom suggests that greater competition in banking, by eroding bank charter values, exacerbates banks’ incentives to take excessive risks. This paper presents a model in which, contrary to this view, competition can cause banks to act more prudently: As competition intensifies and profit margins decline, banks face more-binding threats of failure, to which they may respond by taking lower risks. Nonetheless, competition is unambiguously destabilizing in this model: The direct effect of lower margins on bank failure rates always outweighs the prudence effect. A key implication is that the effects of competition on bank risk taking and on failure risk can move in opposite directions.