We empirically examine theories of secured debt. Credit risk and asset volatility increase with secured debt issuance, and the strength of this association is unrelated to contemporaneous investment. Hand-collected data reveals most secured debt is secured on all assets of the firm and rarely...

This paper models the effect of disclosure on real investment. We show that, even if the act of disclosure is costless, a high-disclosure policy can be costly. Some information ("soft") cannot be disclosed. Increased disclosure of "hard" information augments absolute information and reduces the...

This paper links the impending vesting of CEO equity to reductions in real investment. Existing studies measure the manager's short-term concerns using the sensitivity of his equity to the stock price. However, in myopia theories, the driver of short-termism is not the magnitude of incentives...