Latest News

The Cost of Political Connections

The lead article in Volume 22, Issue 3 of the Review of Finance is The Cost of Political Connections by Marianne Bertrand, Francis Kramarz, Antoinette Schoar, and David Thesmar. This paper shows that CEOs with a background in politics don’t shut down potentially underperforming plants, and open plants that they might not have otherwise, to boost employment in the run-up to a local election.… Read more...

Introduction of Page Limits

The RF is now introducing a 60-page limit (including appendices, bibliography, figures, and tables, but excluding internet appendices). This is for two reasons. First, an excessively long paper is likely to be less impactful. Second, refereeing an excessively long paper is demanding, and this helps ensure that the referee(s) have the capacity to review the manuscript diligently.… Read more...

New Associate Editors From 2018

The Review of Finance is delighted to announce the appointment of Jonathan Cohn, Ian Dew-Becker, Cary Frydman, Cam Harvey, Cliff Holderness, Peter Koudijs, Jacob Sagi, David Solomon, and Lucy White as Associate Editors starting from January 2018. We thank the outgoing Associate Editors Christa Bouwman, Andrea Buraschi, Joost Driessen, Lorenzo Garlappi, Reint Gropp, Bart Lambrecht, Hong Liu, Jose-Luis Peydro Alcalde, and Liuren Wu for many years of distinguished service.… Read more...

Bank Exposures and Sovereign Stress Transmission

(This post is thanks to Editor Thorsten Beck)

The lead article in Volume 21, issue 6 of the Review of Finance is “Bank Exposures and Sovereign Stress Transmission” by Carlo Altavilla, Marco Pagano and Saverio Simonelli. The link between sovereign and bank distress has been at the core of the Eurozone crisis, and several papers have addressed the causes of banks’ concentration on domestic sovereign bonds and the repercussions of this concentration for banks’ lending activity and for the real economy.… Read more...

New Policy on (Self)-Plagiarism

We recently encountered a clear-cut case of self-plagiarism which led to a manuscript being rejected. We have thus added the following to the journal’s Editorial Policy. Going forwards, such a case would lead to a 2-year ban for the authors, but we did not impose it in this case since the policy had not been announced.… Read more...

New Editorial Appointments

The Review of Finance is delighted to announce the appointments of Christine Parlour, Kelly Shue, and Geoff Tate as Editors. Christine will start on November 15, 2017 and Kelly and Geoff will start on January 1, 2018 when Thorsten Beck and Andrew Ellul’s terms as Editors come to an end.… Read more...

Managing Editors’ Report for 2016/17

The Managing Editors’ Report for 2016/7 is available at revfin.org/reports-from-the-editors/.

Some highlights include:

  • The RF remains #4 in finance journals, ranked by 2-year impact factor. Our 5-year impact factor is now 2.827, up from 2.555 in 2015
  • The number of submissions rose from 848 to 923
  • Consistent with our new policy of applying top-three standards, the acceptance rate fell from 8.61% to 6.28%, the number of R&Rs fell by nearly a half to 87, and the number of desk-rejections nearly doubled to 296
  • Our average turnaround time fell from 50 to 38 days

 … Read more...