Social Costs of Bank Capital Requirements in Relation to Lending Incentives

Park, Sangkyun, 2022, "Do Bank Capital Requirements Make Resource Allocation Suboptimal?" Journal of Economic Analysis 1(2), 35-49.

31 Pages Posted: 25 Sep 2012 Last revised: 21 Feb 2023

Date Written: September 25, 2012

Abstract

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 subsidies, stock valuation errors, and tax shields derived from debt financing. The theoretical model analyzes the combined effects of the three factors on the banks’ incentives to make fairly priced loans, which should also be socially optimal loans. A key finding is that the long-term cost of capital requirements is likely to be very small when deposit insurance is underpriced. Increased funding costs resulting from higher capital requirements are absorbed by shareholders of banks, rather than passed on to borrowers. Under some reasonable assumptions, higher capital requirements improve resource allocation by countervailing distortionary effects of deposit insurance subsidies. Short-term adjustment costs can still be large, but it should be relatively easy to mitigate the short-term effects.

Keywords: Costs of Capital Requirements; Deposit Insurance; stock mispricing; tax shields

JEL Classification: G21, G28, E51

Suggested Citation

Park, Sangkyun, Social Costs of Bank Capital Requirements in Relation to Lending Incentives (September 25, 2012). Park, Sangkyun, 2022, "Do Bank Capital Requirements Make Resource Allocation Suboptimal?" Journal of Economic Analysis 1(2), 35-49., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2151904 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2151904

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