An important advantage of secured relative to unsecured debt is that it provides better protection against dilution from other creditors of the firm. While covenants may provide unsecured lenders protection from dilution arising from the issuance of additional debt, they are less likely to be...

Priority spreading refers to the practice of firms increasing their reliance on secured and subordinated debt and reducing their reliance on senior debt as their credit quality deteriorates. We argue that priority spreading occurs, in part, because security provides creditors with greater...

Past studies document that incentive conflicts may lead issuer-paid credit rating agencies to provide optimistically-biased ratings. In this paper, we present evidence that investors question the quality of issuer-paid ratings and raise corporate bond yields where the issuer-paid rating is more...

A significant proportion of the debt issued by investment grade firms has maturities greater than 20 years. In this paper we provide evidence that gap-filling behavior is an important determinant of these very long-term issues. Using data on individual corporate debt issues between 1987 and...

In 2012, the Department of Labor (DOL) imposed new disclosure requirements concerning the indirect fees earned by 401(k) retirement plan service providers through revenue sharing agreements with mutual funds. This paper examines the impact of these fee disclosure requirements on the level and...