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Record W4416371298 · doi:10.1108/ijmf-04-2025-0165

Debt covenant violations and risk shifting behavior

2025· article· en· W4416371298 on OpenAlexaff
Umar Butt, Trevor W. Chamberlain

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Managerial Finance · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicCorporate Insolvency and Governance
Canadian institutionsMcMaster University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCreditorDebtVolatility (finance)ShareholderPaymentScrutinyInvestment (military)Covenant

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Purpose The study has three inter-related goals: first, to examine empirically the transfer of wealth from creditors to shareholders that occurs when firms default on debt covenants, second, to develop a framework for measuring the impact of overinvestment by firms in covenant default and, third, to provide an estimate of the cost to creditors of managerial risk-shifting. Design/methodology/approach The paper examines the relationship between market volatility and investment of financially distressed firms in a real options framework. The debt is taken to be exogenously determined. Numerical methods are employed to assess the impact of volatility on investment. Findings The study finds that the risk-shifting motivations of shareholders offset the anticipated negative relationship between investment and volatility as firms violate covenants and become financially distressed. Research limitations/implications The debt violation data in this study are extracted from filings by SEC registrants posted on the EDGAR website. The laws and regulations affecting firms in other jurisdictions may differ, possibly affecting the options open to firms in financial distress. Practical implications Prior research has found that covenant violations rarely lead to accelerated payment or bankruptcy. The present study suggests that monitoring should include investment scrutiny procedures to minimize risk-shifting behavior. Social implications The results offer a cautionary tale for creditors about the negative value created by risk-shifting when firms are in financial distress. They indicate a need for close monitoring of a firm's investment decisions post-violation. Originality/value This study appears to be the first to provide evidence of changes in the relationship between investment and volatility as a firm violates debt covenants and become financially distressed.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.306
Threshold uncertainty score0.375

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.234
Teacher spread0.226 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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