Comparability without uniformity
We make bespoke contracts comparable without forcing them into a template. The creativity in the deal survives; the market still gets a common language to price, stress, and rank it.
Financial Research Lab
The common language
The common language
for bespoke contracts.
For decades, capital markets 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.
Affiliated with
- Columbia University
- NYU Stern
- NASDAQ Analytics
Two instruments can carry identical headline economics and still be worth different prices — because the contracts beneath them allocate risk differently. That gap is where value is decided, and where it has never been priced.
The Framework
We price the full covenant package of a loan as a portfolio of path-adjusted, probability-weighted embedded options.
Ex-post, not ex-ante
We do not standardize the contract at origination. We standardize the description of it — after the fact, contract by contract — never as an ex-ante template the market has always rejected.
What it says, not what it does
We translate contract terms into a price. We do not forecast the borrower, predict default, or take a credit view. Every output is contract-grounded, ex-post, and auditable back to specific terms.
Optionality runs both ways. A covenant is an option — and the decisive question is who holds it. Borrower-held rights raise required yield; lender-held protections lower it. The engine prices both directions.
Research Agenda
One problem, studied from six directions.
Comparability in private contracts is one of the most consequential unsolved problems in modern capital markets. Our work spans its full surface.
Regulatory & Policy
Meaningful regulatory oversight of private credit requires the ability to compare contracts. We study how a common pricing language makes covenant risk legible to supervisors without forcing standardization at origination.
Market Structure & Infrastructure
Illiquidity in private credit is, at root, a pricing problem. We build the comparability infrastructure that lets bespoke contracts trade, settle, and be marked against one another.
Law & Finance
Credit agreements allocate risk through language. We translate legal and structural terms — covenants, baskets, cures, MFN — into priced, comparable risk, recognizing the contract as the instrument it is.
Historical Precedent & Systemic Risk
Markets that grow faster than their ability to price themselves accumulate hidden risk. We draw the parallels to prior structured-credit failures and ask what comparability would have changed.
Cross-Asset & Broader Mission
The comparability problem is not unique to private credit. We extend the framework to any market where bespoke contracts resist a common price — from structured products to real assets.
Deal Dynamics
Price is not set by terms alone. We model sponsor identity, cross-holder dynamics, and the strategic behavior around covenants that determines how a contract actually performs.
Recent Research
Insights, working papers, and white papers.
Market Failure: Pricing Failing Contracts
When a contract begins to fail, the market has no shared way to price what is happening. We examine why the absence of a common language turns distress into guesswork.
Read →Covenant Structure and the Shape of Corporate Finance
Covenants are not boilerplate — they are the mechanism through which capital is actually allocated. We trace how covenant design reshapes the economics of a deal.
Read → Working Paper · 2025
The Covenant Liquidity Index
A first measure of how covenant structure governs the liquidity of private credit — translating contractual protection into a comparable, priceable index across deals.
Read on SSRN → Working Paper
Peer-facing research published as it matures. White papers and additional working papers are in preparation.
From Framework to Tool
Research, in three states of build.
Design Partnerships
Collaborations with private credit funds, pricing real deal data against the framework.
Public-Agreement Demo
The framework applied to public credit agreements — concrete, runnable, every number traceable to a term.
The Platform
An interactive, contract-native analytical tool for pricing covenant packages at scale.
Events
Where the field convenes.
November 2026 · New York
Market Microstructure Symposium 3.0
The third Market Microstructure Symposium, convened with NYU Stern and NASDAQ Analytics, bringing together academics, practitioners, and regulators on the frontier of market structure. Details forthcoming.
In partnership with NYU Stern & NASDAQ Analytics
Fellowship
For people who take unsolved problems seriously.
We recruit fellows from academia, practice, regulation, technology, and law — to work on what we believe is one of the most consequential unsolved problems in modern capital markets.
Apply or nominate →- Academia
- Practice
- Regulation
- Technology
- Law
About
A research lab, not a vendor.
CovenantLab is led by researchers who have worked at the intersection of academia and the desk, and is affiliated with the Market Microstructure Symposium organized with NYU Stern and NASDAQ Analytics.
UR
Uri Ravid
Co-Founder
Columbia University
ES
Elham Saeidinezhad, Ph.D.
Co-Founder
NYU Stern
Summer 2026
The researchers building it.
Advancing the pricing standard for private-credit and tokenized-asset covenants depends on bringing together sharp, curious people from across credit, quant, and engineering. This summer's team does exactly that.
SK
Shawn Kimble
Credit Risk Modeling Researcher
Finance Ph.D. student at Boston College and former Research Assistant at the Federal Reserve Board — working on private credit, financial intermediation, and corporate finance.
Boston College · Federal Reserve Board (prev.)
DS
Darshit Sarda
Quantitative Finance Researcher
M.S. Financial Engineering student at NYU Tandon, focused on systematic macro research, derivatives pricing, and quantitative strategy development.
NYU Tandon
RS
Roy Salman
AI & Data Engineering Researcher
Columbia Economics & Computer Science student and founder of Athena, an AI-powered college-guidance counselor — builds education technology that widens access.
Columbia University · Athena
Contact
Let's price what couldn't be priced.
We work with funds, regulators, researchers, and fellows. Whether you want to bring deal data into a design partnership, contribute research, or talk about a pilot — start here.
uri@covenantlab.net elham@covenantlab.net
- Design partnerships
- Research collaboration
- Fellowship
- Pilots