Mather and Peirson (2006) report that public debt contracts tend to have a lower average number of accounting-based debt covenants as well as less binding debt covenants. (For example, in relation to debt to assets constraints in both public and private debt agreements, the covenants in the public debt agreements were found to be ‘looser’, meaning that the ratio percentage is typically higher in the public debt contract.) Why would this be the case?