This paper investigates the impact of debt covenant protection on the cross section of equity returns with a firm-level covenant index and four sub-indices. We find that firms with weaker covenant protection (lower covenant index levels) earn significantly higher risk-adjusted equity returns...

In this paper, we find that the conflict of interest between loan holders and bondholders is positively related to bond IPO underpricing, which serves as a compensation to the initial bond investors. We construct four proxies for the conflict between loan holders and bondholders, namely, a loan...