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Journal of Accounting and Economics Vol. 27 No. 2 1999

An empirical examination of the relation between debt contracts and management incentives

Joy Begley; Gerald A. Feltham

University of British Columbia

Abstract

Prior research on the factors influencing the use of debt covenants restricting dividends and additional borrowing is extended by considering management incentives. When alternative incentive variables are considered separately, we find covenants have a significant, negative relation to CEO cash compensation, an insignificant relation to the value of CEO equity held, and significant positive relations to both the ratio of the value of CEO equity holdings to cash compensation and the fraction of equity held by the CEO. In two-stage simultaneous equations models, only the latter is significant when jointly considered with each of the other incentive variables.

DOI
10.1016/s0165-4101(99)00006-3
Volume
27
Issue
2
Pages
229-259
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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