We empirically investigate the effect of growth opportunities in a firms investment  opportunity set on its joint choice of leverage, maturity and covenants.  We use a simultaneous equations framework with leverage, maturity and a covenant index as endogenous variables, and with growth opportunities proxied by the market-to-book  ratio.  We find that the covenant index is significantly increasing in leverage and the market-to-book ratio, and significantly decreasing in the proportion of a firms debt that is short-term.  These results support the predictions that firms use restrictive covenants to control stockholder-bondholder conflicts over the exercise of growth options, and that short-term debt and restrictive covenants are substitutes in controlling such conflicts.   Importantly, we find that leverage is significantly increasing in the market-to-book ratio interacted with the covenant index.  This result supports the prediction that restrictive covenants help attenuate the negative effect of growth opportunities on leverage.  An important by-product of our investigation is that we provide the first large-sample evidence of the incidence of covenants in public debt.  We document that covenants in public debt vary substantially across bond types, firms, industries, and time.