Excerpt from The Agency Cost of Alternative Debt Instruments It is now commonly recognized that a firm's capital structure can affect its value through the incentives that are created for the equity holders in favor of one or another investment and operating policy. A place has therefore been created for a positive theory of capital structure. Missing, however, from the literature on agency costs in finance have been models that enable us to measure the effects of capital structure on the value of the firm's assets. In this paper we show how contingent claims models can be used to measure and compare the agency costs of different forms of debt-fixed rate and indexed. The model can be used to determine the optimal indexing structure and the optimal parameters of the debt contract. The case of index linked debt that we study in this paper is a commodity bond. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.