Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 2,729

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 6 of the 6 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Corporate Debt Value, Bond Covenants, and Optimal Capital Structure

LELAND, HAYNE E.·1994·The Journal of Finance
DOI 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1994.tb02452.x
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This article examines corporate debt values and capital structure in a unified analytical framework. It derives closed‐form results for the value of long‐term risky debt and yield spreads, and for optimal capital structure, when firm asset value follows a diffusion process with constant volatility. Debt values and optimal leverage are explicitly linked to firm risk, taxes, bankruptcy costs, risk‐free interest rates, payout rates, and bond covenants. The results elucidate the different behavior of junk bonds versus investment‐grade bonds, and aspects of asset substitution, debt repurchase, and debt renegotiation.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1994.tb02452.x

Cites

6 of 6 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 6 references

Cited by

See all 2,729

Metadata

Authors
LELAND, H. E.
Venue
The Journal of Finance
Publisher
Wiley
Published
1994-09
Volume
49
Issue
4
Pages
1213-1252
ISSN
  • 0022-1082 (ISSN-L)
  • 1540-6261
DOI
10.1111/j.1540-6261.1994.tb02452.x
OpenAlex
W2154044885
Cited by
2,729
References
6
FWCI
35.46
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Corporate Debt Value, Bond Covenants, and Optimal Capital Structure. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1994.tb02452.x
The paper
LELAND, H. E. (1994). Corporate Debt Value, Bond Covenants, and Optimal Capital Structure. The Journal of Finance. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1994.tb02452.x

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.