Harvey and Hirshleifer (2020) highlight how current norms are for journals to often follow the “Union Heuristic” – require authors to follow all referee suggestions and all referees to sign off for a paper to be published. They argue that this heuristic may lead to (a) innovative research not being published; (b) excessive paper length; (c) wasted author effort on analyses that add little value; and (d) burdens on referees, as papers are rejected at late rounds and then have to start the process again with new referees.… Read more...

The Review of Finance is delighted to announce the appointment of Brian Melzer, Jacopo Ponticelli, and Rick Townsend as Associate Editors, to start a three-year term commencing in January 2021. We thank Peter Koudijs, Jacob Sagi, and Lucy White, whose terms come to an end in December, for their service.… Read more...

The RF is changing its email address to editorialoffice@revfin.org. This change is taking place with immediate effect, so please add us to your email address book to ensure you receive any communications from us.… Read more...

The Review of Finance is delighted to announce the appointment of Daniel Paravisini and Chris Parsons as Editors, to start a three-year term commencing in January 2021. We thank Amiyatosh Purnanandam and Kelly Shue, whose terms come to an end in December, for their outstanding service to the RF, both in handling individual papers and contributing to overall journal strategy.… Read more...

The Managing Editor’s Report for 2019/20 is available here. Some highlights include:

• The impact factor rose by 48% to 2.885. This rise is partly due to the number of zero-cited articles falling by 35%, and partly due to the publication of some high impact papers.

The Review of Finance congratulates the following award winners:

Pagano/Zechner award for the best non-investments paper

• Winner: Gustavo Grullon, Yelena Larkin, Roni Michaely for Are US Industries Becoming More Concentrated? (summary)
• Runner-up: Tobias Berg, Manju Puri, Jörg Rocholl for Loan Officer Incentives, Internal Rating Models, and Default Rates (summary)
• Finalists:
  • Nickolay Gantchev, Oleg R Gredil, Chotibhak Jotikasthira for Governance under the Gun: Spillover Effects of Hedge Fund Activism (summary)
  • Taehyun Kim, Quoc H Nguyen for The Effect of Public Spending on Private Investment
  • Tomislav Ladika, Zacharias Sautner for Managerial Short-Termism and Investment: Evidence from Accelerated Option Vesting (summary)
  • Christopher Naubert, Linda L Tesar for The Value of Systemic Unimportance: The Case of MetLife

Spängler IQAM award for the best investments paper

• Winner: Francesca Brusa, Pavel Savor, Mungo Wilson for One Central Bank to Rule them All (summary)
• Runner-up: Florian Nagler for Yield Spreads and the Corporate Bond Rollover Channel (summary)
• Finalists:
  • Tarvo Vaarmets, Kristjan Liivamägi, Tõnn Talpsepp for How Does Learning and Education Help to Overcome the Disposition Effect?

China may soon become the world’s largest economy, but most academic research in top journals is based on U.S. data.  The insights from papers on U.S. data may not automatically apply to China, since it has a unique set of institutional features, hence the need for research specific to China. … Read more...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a serious crisis.  To understand its effects, and to guide policy responses, we need evidence.  However, since the crisis is recent, we do not yet have enough data to understand its long-term effects; since some policy responses have not yet been tried, or have only recently been implemented, we are unable to assess their success. … Read more...

The pandemic of COVID-19 infections is causing substantial disruptions to daily life around the world. We are grateful to authors continuing to consider the RF as an outlet for their work during these disruptions. Our editors and referees reviewers are also affected by these disruptions.… Read more...