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To avoid delays, please follow the submission requirements carefully. The editor will not see your paper until all these requirements are met. Resubmissions must conform to the same requirements (with the exception of the Code Sharing policy if the initial first-round submission was before September 2, 2016).

Authors should also note the JF’s policies regarding conflicts of interest between authors, editors, associate editors, and referees. Information on these policies is available by clicking here.

Additional information about Replications and Corrigenda submissions are provided below.

Information about the new editorial team is available by clicking here.

Submission Guidelines and Requirements

Formatting

• File format: All papers must be in PDF format and submitted electronically.

• Title page: Refereeing at The Journal of Finance (JF) is single-blind. The first page of your paper should be a title page that includes the names of the authors, the title of the manuscript, and an abstract of not more than 100 words. Designation of a corresponding author is not required at the initial submission stage, but will be required in the final version if the paper gets accepted.

• Disclosure statements: You must provide a conflict-of-interest disclosure statement that includes a separate disclosure for each author by name and place it on the page following the title page of your submission–not in a separate file and not in the acknowledgments footnote. Resubmissions must include a disclosure statement, too. The disclosure statement must be included even if the authors have nothing to disclose (this fact should then be explicitly stated, e.g., “I have nothing to disclose”). The disclosure statement will be available to referees. The statement pages do not count toward the 60-page limit. Click here to see an example. Please carefully review the Conflict of Interest Disclosure Policy before submitting the paper. Submissions without disclosure statements will be returned to the submitting author immediately.

• Length: Your manuscript must not exceed 60 pages in length (with at least 1.5 line spacing, 12-point font, 1-inch side margins, and 1.5-inch top/bottom margins). This page limit includes internal appendices, reference lists, figures, and tables. Papers exceeding this page limit will be immediately desk-rejected. This formatting also applies to resubmissions.

• Internet Appendix: Additional material may be included in an Internet Appendix, which must be placed at the end of the manuscript as part of the same pdf file, not as a separate upload. Also, the title “Internet Appendix” must be added to the top of the first page to avoid confusing it with a regular appendix. It does not count toward the 60-page limit. However, the paper must be self-contained so that readers can understand the study in its entirety without having to rely on any separate material.

Click here for additional mandatory submission guidelines and requirements.

Code sharing policy: If your paper is accepted for publication, the code used to produce the paper’s results must be submitted with the final version of the paper and will be made available in the Supplementary Information section of the online version of the article. Please see the Code Sharing Policy and Code Sharing Policy FAQ for further explanations. By submitting to the JF, the authors agree to comply with this policy. Requests for exemption must be made in the cover letter to the editor at the time of the first submission.

Cover letter: In most cases, a cover letter is not necessary. Please use the cover letter only if you have specific information for the editors such as a request for exemption from the code sharing policy, information about potential conflict of interest that referees, associate editors, or editors may have in evaluating your paper. If you do not have such specific information to convey, do not include a cover letter. If you include a cover letter, you may find it most convenient to type or paste it directly into the cover letter text box on the Editorial Express submission form.

Submission Fees

• High-Income Economies. *AFA Members: $400, Non-Members: $525

• Middle-Income Economies. *AFA Members: $100, Non-Members: $150

• Low-Income Economies. **No Submission Fee

*To receive discounted member pricing, join the AFA here.

**Click here for lists of economies by income level. Please note: To qualify for a fee waiver or reduced fee, all authors of the submission must currently reside in a low- or middle-income-economy country.

Submission fees will be paid via credit card (Visa, MasterCard or American Express) as part of the submission procedure. Authors with reviewing credits can use those to pay all or part of the fee. (To inquire about your reviewing account balance, please email Wendy Washburn at JFeditor@afajof.org.)

Return/Refund Policy: The submission fee will be refunded if the editorial decision on a submission is rendered more than 100 days after the receipt of the submission by the editorial office. This refund policy applies only to a manuscript’s first submission. The fee will also be refunded if the submission receives a desk rejection (except for resubmissions of previously rejected papers).

Open Access

The JF offers authors an open access option to have their article freely available to everyone, including non-subscribers. More information on open access, including fees, can be found on Wiley’s JF open access page. In addition, the JF allows authors to self-archive pre-publication versions of their accepted paper in online repositories such as SSRN or authors’ own websites.

Submission Site

When you have followed all the submission requirements above, you can submit a new paper to The Journal of Finance here (to submit a revision, select “Resubmission” in Step 2). Remember to include the disclosure statement. If you have nothing to disclose, this fact must be stated explicitly on the page after the title page (e.g., “I have nothing to disclose”). A disclosure statement is required for resubmissions, too.

If you have questions or encounter problems with the submissions process, please email the Assistant Editor Wendy Washburn at JFeditor@afajof.org.

Replications and Corrigenda Submissions

As part of our ongoing effort to expand professional dialogue about papers published in The Journal of Finance, we have introduced a periodic section of the Journal for “Replications and Corrigenda.” The Editors invite authors to submit short papers that document material sensitivities of central results in papers published in the Journal. These would include key choices made in an empirical design to which the original study is not robust, and the non-robustness of a key theoretical economic result. This section would also publish corrigenda from authors reporting material errors their papers published in the Journal.

Submissions for consideration for this section should be short, no longer than 20 pages all inclusive of figures, tables, and references (following all the other submission guidelines above).

Acceptance for publication in the Replications and Corrigenda section will be at the discretion of the Editors of the Journal. The publication of replication papers will take into account if the results replicated in the paper are still relevant for the profession or if they have already been discounted by the subsequent literature (as judged by the reviewing team).

An alternative to publishing a Replication or Corrigendum is to post it on the Journal website with a link to the original published paper. Which, if any, of these options is chosen will be at the discretion of the Editor. The Replications and Corrigenda section will only appear when there are qualifying submissions to publish.

Appeals

The Journal of Finance allows authors to appeal rejected submissions for a fee of $600.

For an appeal to potentially have merit (and to trigger a fresh review), the author must provide a solid argument that the referees, AE, or and the editors have made an error in the evaluation of the paper based on what was in the original submission. The appeal only has merit if the author can argue that substance in the original paper (or possibly elsewhere in existing literature) refutes points raised by the reviewing team that were material in the decision to reject the paper. For example, arguments that issues that lead to rejection could be fixed in a revised version of the paper are not valid grounds for appeal. Moreover, the errors have to be mistakes concerning facts. Appeals based on subjective judgments about the contribution of the paper will not be considered.

Click here for a more detailed description of the appeal policy and instructions for submitting.

Click here to submit an appeal.