Competition and risk taking in banking: The charter value hypothesis revisited

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.