This paper investigates the impact of debt covenant protection on the cross section of equity returns with a firm-level covenant index and four sub-indices. We find that firms with weaker covenant protection (lower covenant index levels) earn significantly higher risk-adjusted equity returns...

Hedge funds often hold illiquid assets whose true value is slowly reflected in reported returns. As a result, reported returns of a hedge fund can become a smoothed version of its true realized returns and, thus, can bias the evaluation of hedge fund performance. To address this problem, we...