Debt covenants are pervasive in debt contracts. To prevent the dilution of existing debt, most creditors set covenants of a maximum debt-to-earnings ratio for borrowing firms. In this paper, we embed debt covenants into a workhorse real business cycle model with defaultable debt to study its macroeconomic implications. In our model, creditors penalize firms when debt covenants are violated. We show such a mechanism that covenants significantly reduce debt dilution and default over the business cycles. Furthermore, reduced debt dilution due to debt covenants also mitigates the debt overhang problem and thus boosts capital accumulation. Compared to counterfactual economies without covenants, the baseline economy with debt covenants experiences endogenous stabilization of macroeconomic shocks and higher levels of capital, output, and consumption.

We develop a model of a financial institution to study how shareholder—debt holder conflicts interact with prudential capital regulation and accounting measurement rules. Our analysis highlights the result that, for highly leveraged financial institutions—when prudential regulation play an important role—debt overhang and asset substitution inefficiencies work in opposing directions. We demonstrate that, relative to the “historical cost” regime in which assets and liabilities on an institution’s balance sheet are measured at their origination values, fair value could alleviate the inefficiencies arising from asset substitution, but exacerbate those arising from underinvestment due to debt overhang. The optimal choices of accounting regime and prudential solvency constraint balance the conflicts between shareholders and debt holders. Under fair value accounting, the optimal solvency constraint declines with the institution’s marginal cost of investment in project quality and the excess cost of equity capital relative to debt capital. Fair value accounting dominates historical cost accounting provided the solvency constraints in the respective regimes take their optimal values. If the solvency constraints are sub-optimally chosen, however, historical cost accounting could dominate fair value accounting.

This article uses a contingent-claims valuation method to compare debt financing, investment, and risk choices of a firm adopting the second-best strategy with those of a firm adopting the first-best strategy. The former bears the agency costs, as conjectured by Jensen and Meckling (1976) and Myers (1977), because it chooses suboptimal investment timing and risk levels, while the latter is able to avoid them. For plausible parameter values, we find that the second-best firm that takes on more debt will under-invest and bear excessive risk. We also find that the agency costs of debt are 15.8% of the first-best firm value, which is higher than that found by Leland (1998) and Mauer and Sarkar (2005).