中文摘要：

针对中国政府将发展债券市场作为资本市场改革的重要战略这一趋势，本文研究了债券融资成本与债券契约设计的关系。我们通过手工摘录和归纳债券契约条款，衡量出债券投资者保护强度。研究发现：公司债的债权人保护设计越好，融资成本越低；公司债券的融资金额越大，债券融资成本越低；公司债券的到期期限越短，债券融资成本越低；有担保的公司债融资成本更低。这些研究结果表明，发债主体可以通过债券契约设计提高对债券投资者的保护，从而降低融资成本。

英文摘要：

Chinese government clearly defined the development of debt market as one of the most important strategies of capital market reforms. This paper studies the relationship between the cost of debt and corporate bond covenant in China. We manually collect and analyze the bond covenants and estimate the degree of bond protection based on different designs of bond covenants. We discover that： （ 1 ） The better protection for bond- holders, the lower the cost of corporate bond; （2） the larger amount of debt issue, the cost of debt is more likely to be lower; （ 3 ） the shorter maturity, the cost of debt is more likely to be lower; and （ 4 ） the bond with collateral tends to have lower cost of debt. Those results suggest that when the issuers attempt to design bond covenants for better protection of bondholders and mitigating the agency conflicts between bond issuers and investors, their costs of debt are likely to be lower.