Journal of Finance

About the journal

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

Purchase and pricing information

To obtain an Institutional Subscription to The Journal of Finance please click here.

To join the American Finance Association (which includes a personal subscription to The Journal of Finance) please click here.

Information for authors

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 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. If the paper involves co-authors, each co-author must contribute a separate declaration by name in the disclosure statement. 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. Please include the title “Internet Appendix” at the top of the first page. 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: $250, Non-Members: $300

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

• Low-Income Economies. No Submission Fee

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 editor@jfinance.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.

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, including the disclosure statement, you can submit a new paper to The Journal of Finance here (to submit a revision, select “Resubmission” in Step 2). 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”). Otherwise the editor will not get to see your paper and it will be returned to you, causing unnecessary delay. A disclosure statement is required for resubmissions, too. Currently about 50% of submissions are returned to authors immediately because the disclosure statement is missing.

Abstracting and indexing services

• ABI/INFORM Database (ProQuest)
• Business Abstracts (HW Wilson)
• Business ASAP (GALE Cengage)
• Business Periodicals Index/Abstracts (HW Wilson)
• CatchWord
• CSA Environmental Sciences & Pollution Management Database (CSA/CIG)
• Current Contents Collections/ Business (Thomson Reuters)
• Current Contents: Social & Behavioral Sciences (Thomson Reuters)
• Current Index to Statistics (ASA/IMS)
• EBSCO Online (EBSCO)
• EconLit (AEA)
• Emerald Management Reviews (Emerald)
• IBSS: International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (ProQuest)
• InfoTrac
• Journal Citation Reports/Social Science Edition (Thomson Reuters)
• OmniFile Full Text Mega Edition (HW Wilson)
• OmniFile V (HW Wilson)
• PAIS: Public Affairs Information Service (CSA/CIG)
• ProQuest 5000 (ProQuest)
• ProQuest Accounting and Tax Database (ProQuest)
• ProQuest Discovery (ProQuest)
• ProQuest Platinum (ProQuest)
• ProQuest Research Library (ProQuest)
• RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (RePEc)
• Social Sciences Citation Index (Thomson Reuters)
• Social SciSearch (Thomson Reuters)

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