CovenantLab · Financial Research Lab
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Financial Research Lab

The common language
for bespoke contracts

For decades, capital markets have faced a false choice: accept standardization and gain liquidity, or preserve contractual creativity and lose comparability.

CovenantLab’s thesis is that this tradeoff is no longer necessary.

Recent from CovenantLab
April 19, 2026 · Article
Market Failure: Pricing Failing Contracts
When contracts cannot be compared, markets cannot price them. The failure to standardize covenant analysis is not a technical gap — it is a market failure.
Read →
April 1, 2026 · Article
Covenant Structure is Corporate Finance
Seniority indicates where a claim sits in the capital stack. Covenants determine what that position actually allows a creditor to do.
Read →
Research & Intellectual Mission
Regulatory & Policy
Meaningful regulatory oversight of private credit requires the ability to compare contracts across deals and lenders. That comparability does not currently exist. CovenantLab is building the analytical foundation it would require — connecting the framework directly to how regulators monitor, assess, and intervene in private markets.
Market Structure & Infrastructure
Illiquidity in private credit is structural, not accidental. Without a pricing framework for covenant packages, there is no credible basis for secondary market pricing. This is the missing infrastructure. The ISDA parallel is instructive: derivatives were bespoke and opaque until a standardization layer preserved creativity while making markets function.
Law & Finance
Legal and structural risk embedded in credit agreements is real, measurable, and currently not separated from credit risk in any model. Document risk is an unrecognized asset class risk. The information asymmetry between lenders and borrowers — sponsors have legal teams reading every word; lenders often don’t — is structural and growing.
Historical Precedent & Systemic Risk
Mortgage-backed securities failed partly because no one had a framework to compare underlying contract quality across pools. Private credit is building the same opacity at scale, just more slowly. Recovery rates are falling while default rates remain stable — the covenant erosion thesis is the most compelling explanation.
Cross-Asset & Broader Mission
Bespoke contract opacity exists across every asset class where deals are privately negotiated — real estate, private equity, insurance, structured products. The standardization problem is not unique to private credit. Pension funds and insurers entering private credit have fiduciary mandates requiring pricing rigor they cannot currently satisfy.
Deal Dynamics & Practitioner Issues
Sponsor identity is a meaningful predictor of how covenant packages will be tested under stress. Cross-holder dynamics — who controls the amendment vote, who has a blocking position, how coalitions form — are analytically tractable but completely unmodeled. The NAV lending boom introduces new layers of structural complexity the market has not yet priced.
Framework & Industry
The Model
A pricing framework for contractual optionality
CovenantLab prices the full covenant package of a private credit loan as a portfolio of path-adjusted, probability-weighted embedded options — integrating covenant quality into a complete loan valuation covering default risk, loss severity, market sentiment, and the structural value of the covenant package itself.
Design Partnerships
Working with institutions on real deals
CovenantLab is building design partnerships with private credit funds and secondary market participants who provide real deal data in exchange for framework outputs — covenant package valuation, path degradation tracking, and scenario analysis.
Active
Demo
Framework applied to real credit agreements
CovenantLab applies the framework to publicly available credit agreements, demonstrating how covenant classification, effective rank scoring, and path mapping produce genuinely novel analytical outputs.
Coming
Platform
An interactive contract-native analytical tool
The CovenantLab pipeline will allow practitioners to upload a credit agreement and explore it through the framework — pricing covenant optionality, mapping borrower paths, assigning zones, and generating insights unavailable from any market data provider.
In Development

About

CovenantLab is a financial research lab building the common language for a new era in capital markets — one where bespoke contracts can be made comparable without artificial standardization.

The lab was founded on a simple but consequential conviction: that the tradeoff between contractual creativity and comparability is not inevitable. Private credit, real estate, insurance, private equity — everywhere deals are privately negotiated, the same opacity problem exists. The contract carries information the market cannot currently read, compare, or price.

CovenantLab is building the framework to change that. Not by standardizing contracts — but by standardizing how contracts are translated into value. The intellectual foundation is rigorous. The mission is large. The work is just beginning.

Founders
Uri Ravid
Columbia University · Incoming J.P. Morgan IB

Financial economist with deep focus on private credit structure, covenant analytics, and capital markets. Co-architect of the TDR framework and the covenant classification methodology underlying CovenantLab’s research program.

Elham Saeidinezhad, Ph.D.
NYU Stern · CCNY

Financial economist specializing in market microstructure, monetary policy, and financial regulation. Co-architect of the TDR framework and the theoretical foundations of CovenantLab’s analytical approach to contractual optionality.

Affiliation

CovenantLab operates as an independent financial research lab. The lab is affiliated with the Market Microstructure Symposium, co-organized with NYU Stern and NASDAQ Analytics.

Research

CovenantLab publishes working papers, white papers, and insights. All outputs are freely available.

Insights +

Insights will appear here as they are published.

White Papers +

Fellowship white papers will appear here as they are published.

Working Papers +
The Covenant Liquidity Index
CovenantLab · 2025

Introduces a framework for pricing the full covenant package of a private credit loan as a portfolio of path-adjusted, probability-weighted embedded options, integrating covenant quality into a complete loan valuation.

Read on SSRN →
Research Agenda −

CovenantLab’s broader research agenda spans original conceptual contributions — from covenants as optionality and path dependence in borrower exercise sequences, to the role of covenant architecture in determining effective rank within seniority tiers — and topics of active interest connecting the framework to regulatory infrastructure, secondary market development, and the standardization of bespoke contracts across asset classes.

Outputs are added as they are produced. If you are interested in contributing, see the Fellowship page.

Events

CovenantLab organizes and participates in events connecting the research agenda to the broader practitioner, academic, and policy community.

November 2026 · 9:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Market Microstructure Symposium 3.0
Organized by CovenantLab · NYU Stern · NASDAQ Analytics
Organizers: Elham Saeidinezhad · Itai Dreifuss · Uri Ravid
About

Details coming soon.

Agenda

Agenda coming soon.

Speakers

Speakers coming soon.

Registration

Registration details coming soon. To express interest, contact us at info@covenantlab.net.

Fellowship

CovenantLab is building a community of fellows — academics, practitioners, regulators, technologists, and legal scholars — who share a conviction that the comparability problem in private contracts is one of the most consequential unsolved problems in modern capital markets.

Fellows contribute to the research agenda, co-author white papers, and engage publicly with the standardization mission from their domain.

Fellows will be listed here. If this mission resonates and you would like to contribute, reach out at or .

The Model

CovenantLab’s analytical framework prices the full covenant package of a private credit loan as a portfolio of embedded contractual options.

Further detail on the framework will be published here. See the Research page for working papers.

Partnerships

CovenantLab is building design partnerships with private credit funds and secondary market participants.

If you are interested in becoming a design partner, contact us at info@covenantlab.net.

Demo

CovenantLab applies the framework to real credit agreements, demonstrating how covenant classification, effective rank scoring, and path mapping produce genuinely novel analytical outputs unavailable from any existing tool.

Demo outputs coming soon.

Contact

To collaborate, contribute research, or learn more about CovenantLab, reach out directly.

For fellowship inquiries, include your institutional affiliation and a brief description of your domain expertise. For design partnerships, include your firm and the nature of your interest.