Review of Finance (review-of-finance)

Journal positioning

Review of Finance is the flagship journal of the European Finance Association and the leading European top-tier finance journal, broad and rigorous across the major subfields. It sits just below the finance "top-3" (JF/JFE/RFS) in the elite tier: it wants serious, well-identified contributions to asset pricing, corporate finance, banking, and microstructure, and is a natural home for excellent work that is one notch narrower than a top-3 paper. The readership is international and spans the whole finance profession.

This skill is a fit / venue-selection / re-framing tool. It does not replace the journal's current official submission guidelines. Before submitting, re-check the live author instructions on the EFA / Review of Finance / Oxford site and the editorial submission system.

When to trigger

• The author names Review of Finance (or the elite European/field tier) as the target venue.
• A finance paper is strong and well-identified but narrower than a JF/JFE/RFS contribution, and the author wants a top elite-tier home.
• An applied paper using financial data needs re-framing into a finance contribution with a clear mechanism.
• The author needs Review of Finance's desk-reject risks and a credible top-3 / elite-field alternative list.

Scope & topic fit

• Asset pricing (empirical and theoretical), cross-section of returns, factor models, with credible robustness.
• Corporate finance, governance, M&A, capital structure, payout, ownership, with credible identification.
• Banking/intermediation, liquidity, market microstructure, household and behavioral finance.
• Internationally oriented finance questions and well-executed work across the field's core paradigms.

Method & evidence bar

• Identification and economic mechanism, not just significant loadings: a return predictor or corporate-finance effect must survive standard-error corrections, alternative explanations, and out-of-sample / placebo scrutiny.
• Asset-pricing empirics meet current inference standards (multiple-testing/p-hacking, proper standard errors, factor-zoo skepticism).
• Corporate-finance causal claims need a real source of variation (shocks, regulation, discontinuities) with modern DiD/IV/RDD rigor.
• Theory must deliver testable, economically interpretable implications.

Structure & house style

• The introduction states the question, the economic mechanism, the identification, and the headline magnitude early, and explains why it matters for finance.
• Distinguish the contribution from the nearest top-3 and Review of Finance papers explicitly; "no one has tested X" is not a contribution.
• Review of Finance uses an unstructured abstract and JEL codes; an Internet Appendix carries robustness and secondary results.
• Exhibits report economic magnitudes (not only t-stats); the central result should be readable from one table.

Official-submission checklist

• Before giving submission-ready advice, read ../../resources/source-basis.md and ../../resources/official-source-map.md; start from the official source anchors for this journal family, then cite the current journal-specific page you checked.
• Search the live site for "Review of Finance submission guidelines" and follow the current EFA/Oxford version.
• Re-check the submission fee, formatting, abstract/JEL, anonymization, and the disclosure policy (data sources, conflicts, prior circulation).
• Re-check the current data/code and Internet Appendix requirements and any replication expectations.
• If the live official instructions conflict with this skill, the official instructions win.

Pre-submission self-check

• One sentence stating why this result matters to the broad finance profession.
• The contribution is stated as mechanism / identification / new measurement, not as a significant coefficient.
• The introduction positions the paper against the most recent top-3 and Review of Finance work on this question.
• Inference is robust to current standards (clustering, multiple testing, out-of-sample, placebo).
• Disclosure, data sources, and the Internet Appendix are ready.

Common desk-reject triggers

• A "new anomaly / new factor" paper that does not clear the multiple-testing and robustness bar.
• A corporate-finance regression with endogeneity and no credible source of variation.
• Significant coefficients reported without economic magnitude or mechanism.
• A paper that is really accounting or economics framed as finance, or a thin contribution better suited to a broad-volume outlet.

Re-routing decision

• Top-3 importance → journal-of-finance, journal-of-financial-economics, review-of-financial-studies.
• Peer elite-field venues → journal-of-financial-and-quantitative-analysis, journal-of-corporate-finance, journal-of-financial-intermediation.
• Banking/markets/international → journal-of-banking-and-finance, journal-of-financial-markets, journal-of-international-money-and-finance.
• Quantitative/derivatives theory → mathematical-finance; econometrics-of-finance → journal-of-empirical-finance; practitioner-relevant corporate finance → financial-management.

Output format

[Fit] High / Medium / Low (one-line reason)
[Target] Review of Finance
[Topic tags] <2–3 closest topics>
[Method/evidence] <does the identification / mechanism clear the elite-finance bar?>
[Top risk] <the single most likely reason for rejection>
[Official items to re-check] <submission system / fee / disclosure / Internet Appendix / data>
[Re-route suggestion] <if not a fit, a better-matched venue>