Corporate lending contracts typically contain accounting-based covenants that alleviate
the bondholder stockholder conflict within the borrowing firm and thereby increase
firm value (see, e.g.. Smith 1993). Debt covenants are divided into affirmative
covenants and negative covenants. Affirmative covenants require borrowing firms to
maintain specified levels of accounting-based ratios, e.g., minimum working capital
and interest coverage. Negative covenants restrict the financing and investing activities
of borrowing firms (e.g., dividend payments and issuance of new debt) unless conditions specified in terms of accounting numbers are satisfied. A covenant that becomes
binding imposes costs on a firm, either in renegotiating the bond issue with its purchasers
to remove the covenant or in restricting its opportunity set.* Since it is costly to
violate debt covenants, and since covenants contain accounting-based constraints that
are frequently defined in terms of earnings (e.g., as levels of unrestricted retained earnings
or as the ratio of net income to interest expense), it follows that managers act to
minimize technical violation of accounting-based restrictions in debt agreements by
earnings manipulation. To test this prediction, it is standard to assume that leverage is
a proxy for the existence and closeness of accounting-based constraints.' On the basis
of this assumption, it has been proposed that, other things being equal, the larger a
firm's debt-equity ratio, the more likely its managers are to shift reported earnings from
future periods to a current period and to engage in greater manipulations.'° In timing
asset sales, this debt-equity hypothesis suggests the following test able hypothesis (stated
in the alternative form):