Understanding the JAR Review Process (jar-review-process)
When to trigger
- Before submitting, to understand what to expect at JAR specifically
- A decision letter arrived and you need to read it correctly
- You are deciding between the regular track, a Registered Report, or the conference
- You are unsure how the editor-panel structure assigns and decides papers
How JAR is governed and decides
JAR has no single editor-in-chief. It is run by a panel of Senior Editors (as of 2026-06-22: Philip G. Berger, Anna Costello, Luzi Hail, Valeri Nikolaev, Haresh Sapra, Laurence van Lent, Regina Wittenberg Moerman; Christian Leuz stepped down June 30, 2025 and Hans B. Christensen joins July 1, 2026 — re-verify the masthead), supported by ~18 Associate Editors and Editorial Manager Lisa M. Heiberger. A submission is assigned to a Senior Editor who, typically with one or more Associate Editors and external referees, runs a double-anonymized review of regular manuscripts. The journal is sponsored by the Chookaszian Accounting Research Center at Chicago Booth and published with Wiley-Blackwell — a single-center "house" identity rather than a scholarly-society journal.
Gates before and during review
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Desk screen / conformance. Non-conforming submissions can be desk-rejected (with only a half refund of the fee). Get format, anonymization, scope, and the article type right before submitting.
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Tiered fee gate. The $750 / $500 / $50 fee must be received within one week or the paper is withdrawn — an explicit pay-to-review gate; budget for it.
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Submission cap. At most four new papers per author over a rolling two-year period (R&Rs excluded) — plan which projects to send.
Reading a JAR decision
Outcomes range from desk reject, to reject after review, to revise-and-resubmit (R&R), to (rarely on a first round) acceptance. Treat an R&R as a serious invitation: identify which referee concerns are first-order (identification, the channel, sample/measurement) versus second-order (exposition, additional robustness). The Senior Editor's letter is the binding guide — it prioritizes among the referees. First-round accepts are essentially unheard of; multiple rounds are normal.
The distinctive tracks
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Ray Ball JAR Annual Conference. A flagship conference at Chicago Booth funded by the Chookaszian Center; selected papers are considered simultaneously for the conference and for journal publication and appear in the conference issue (historically June) subject to passing normal editorial review. The 62nd (2027) conference is themed "Current Topics in Accounting Research by Emerging Scholars," giving preference to untenured authors who received a PhD no earlier than 2017; submission deadline Dec 1, 2026; conference dates Apr 30-May 1, 2027. Verify the current call.
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Registered Reports. A two-stage process pioneered at JAR in 2017 (with Robert Bloomfield): authors pre-register hypotheses and an analysis plan; after Stage 1 protocol review the journal grants in-principle acceptance, guaranteeing publication regardless of whether results support predictions, provided the approved protocol is followed at Stage 2. Best for higher-outcome-risk work requiring new data collection.
Checklist
Anti-patterns
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Treating JAR like a single-EIC journal — it is an editor panel.
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Skimping on conformance and drawing a desk reject with only a half refund.
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Reading every referee point as equal instead of following the editor's priorities.
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Misusing the conference track (ignoring eligibility/theme) or the RR track (no real pre-registration).
Output format
【Decision type】desk reject / reject / R&R / accept
【Editor priorities】first-order: [...]; second-order: [...]
【Track】regular / Ray Ball conference / Registered Report (stage)
【Gates】conformance / fee-timing / submission-cap status
【What to do next】revise per editor → jar-rebuttal
Resources
