A Covenant, in general, is a promise undertaken by a company to its lenders or bondholders. Covenants are either operational or financial. This dissertation focuses mainly on financial covenants, which are commonly included in bonds and loan agreements in order to safeguard creditors' interest....

This paper attempts to link the agency literature (concerned with whether debt will trigger underinvestment incentives or risk-shifting behavior) with the one dealing with temporal resolution of uncertainty. To the best of our knowledge, apart from one article by John and Ronen (1990), there is...

This paper is intended to measure Reisz's (1999) empirical implication about bond yields against data: yields demanded on corporate debt should be higher the later the uncertainty facing the firm is resolved. We conduct our study looking at new bond issues made by industrial corporations between...

This paper attempts to link the agency literature (concerned with the fact that tensions between bondholders and shareholders may trigger suboptimal investment decisions) with the one dealing with temporal resolution of uncertainty (TRU). We consider here how the speed of resolution of the...

Credit default swaps (CDSs) are an effective tool to trade credit risk, and they can improve the corporate information environment. We find that firms use more public debt and less bank debt when CDSs reference their debt start trading. The results are robust to the endogeneity of CDS trading....

We document several facts about corporate debt maturity: (1) debt maturity is pro-cyclical; (2) higher-beta firms tend to have longer debt maturity; (3) shorter maturity amplifies the sensitivity of credit spreads to aggregate shocks. We build a dynamic capital structure model that explains...