Writing Style (jfi-writing-style)

When to trigger

• Polishing a JFI draft before submission or revision
• Aligning references, sections, and abstract with JFI/Elsevier conventions

JFI house conventions (verified 2026-06-20; re-confirm on the official page)

• Numbered sections (1, 1.1, 1.1.1) structure the manuscript.
• References: "your-paper-your-way" at submission — any internally consistent style is accepted; the journal applies an author–date (name–year) Elsevier style at proof. In-text citations give surname(s) and year, with "et al." for three or more authors; the list is alphabetical then chronological, with a/b/c disambiguation for same-author/same-year items. Keep author–year fields clean.
• Abstract: concise, factual, and able to stand alone, with references avoided; keep it at 250 words or fewer.
• Keywords: provide 1-7 English keywords for indexing.
• Optional Highlights: 3–5 bullets, max 85 characters each, strongly encouraged.
• Generative-AI disclosure: if AI writing tools were used, declare them in a dedicated section before the References (see jfi-submission).

Make the mechanism land

JFI is read by intermediation specialists who reward a clearly motivated economic mechanism:

• Explain the intermediary friction and channel before the econometric specification or the formal model — the reader should know why before how.
• Tie every result back to the intermediation contribution (see jfi-contribution-framing); avoid coefficient-by-coefficient narration with no economic interpretation.
• Define institutional terms on first use; precision about banks, loans, and regulation signals fluency.

Mechanism-first rewrite, worked (illustrative)

• Before: "We regress loan growth on the capital shortfall interacted with bank size, controlling for firm fixed effects. The coefficient is −2.1 and significant at the 1% level."
• After: "Banks that must rebuild capital face a choice between costly equity and shrinking assets. If lending relationships embody information rivals cannot replicate, constrained banks can cut relationship credit without losing the borrower — so recapitalization's burden falls on locked-in firms. Consistent with this, a 1pp shortfall reduces credit to the same firm by 2.1pp, and twice that for single-bank borrowers."
• The rewrite names friction → channel → prediction before the number, which is how this journal's specialist readership parses a result; the regression mechanics move to the design section.

An intermediation lexicon check

Loose vocabulary signals a non-specialist to a single-blind referee who knows your name:

• liquidity creation (the Diamond–Dybvig transformation function) vs. liquidity provision (supplying funds) — not interchangeable;
• capital requirement (the rule) vs. capital ratio (the outcome) vs. capital shock (the change you exploit);
• say credit supply only after demand is absorbed — until then it is "lending growth";
• relationship lending implies repeated interaction and private information, not merely an existing loan;
• a run is strategic withdrawal, not any deposit outflow;
• shadow bank denotes intermediation outside the regulated perimeter, not any nonbank financial firm.

Style pushbacks at this venue, and fixes

• "The introduction is a results list" → restructure as friction, mechanism, design, finding, lesson.
• "Notation drifts between model and empirics" → one symbol table; the model's friction parameter should be the object the regression coefficient estimates or proxies.
• "Reads like a policy report" → replace recommendation language with the equilibrium or identified margin the analysis actually delivers.
• "The abstract could describe ten papers" → one abstract sentence each for friction, design or model, headline magnitude or proposition, and the intermediation lesson; cut everything else.

Anti-patterns

• A numbered/footnote citation style left in at submission with no internal consistency
• An abstract stuffed with references or with no stated finding
• Specifications introduced before the mechanism is explained
• Forgetting the AI-disclosure section when such tools were used

Output format

【Sections】numbered (1, 1.1)? [Y/N]
【References】internally consistent, author–year-ready? [Y/N]
【Abstract】concise, stand-alone, no refs, <=250 words? [Y/N]
【Mechanism-first】explained before specs? [Y/N]
【AI disclosure】present-if-used? [Y/N]
【Next skill】jfi-replication-and-data-policy