In this paper, we prove a decomposition result for the Chow groups of projectivizations of coherent sheaves of homological dimension $\le 1$ . In this process, we establish the decomposition of Chow groups for the cases of the Cayley trick and standard flips. Moreover, we apply these results to study the Chow groups of symmetric powers of curves, nested Hilbert schemes of surfaces, and the varieties resolving Voisin maps for cubic fourfolds.

We study the relationship between the equations defining a projective variety and properties of its secant varieties. In particular, we use information about the syzygies among the defining equations to derive smoothness and normality statements about SecX and also to obtain information about linear systems on the blow up of projective space along a variety X. We use these results to geometrically construct, for varieties of arbitrary dimension, a flip first described in the case of curves by M. Thaddeus via Geometric Invariant Theory.