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2006 News Archive

December 27, 2006:

If you submitted a paper through the dual review system with the Utah Winter Finance Conference you should have received a decision letter via email today. If you have not please let Tricia Cushing know as soon as possible. Remember, if the RFS is not proceeding with your paper through in the dual review system that does not mean your paper is rejected from the RFS. You are still free to submit it via the standard submission system (unaltered if you like) without any prejudice whatsoever.

December 18, 2006:

The RFS is pleased to announce a joint conference with the NBER on Corporate Governance. The submission deadline is May 1, 2007. Click on the link to your right about the conference for additional details.

The RFS now has the reviews from the dual submissions to the Utah Winter Finance Conference in hand. Hopefully, decisions will go out by the end of the week. Remember, even if we do not proceed with the editorial process on your paper via the dual review system you are more than welcome to submit it via the regular submission system. Initially, papers are parsed with the aid of the conference reviews and these are typically not as thorough as a normal referee’s report. This is not to knock the efforts of the conference reviewers. They simply cannot put the time into five to ten papers for a conference that they do for a single referee report requested by a journal.

October 2, 2006:

If you submitted a paper to the Utah Winter Finance Conference under the dual submission option you should have received an email verification from the RFS. If you have not received an email verifying that the RFS is considering your paper under the dual submission system and if you in fact wanted it considered as such please email Tricia Cushing as soon as possible so that we can straighten out your paper’s status.

September 7, 2006:

The RFS has a brand new forum! Please take a look and POST your views. In other news: As previously promised here are the statistics from the journal’s first year with new formal appeals process. From July 1, 2005 to June 30 2006 the RFS received 17 appeals. Of those 17 there were 5 in process as of July 1. Of the remaining 12 there were 2 that had their decisions changed from reject to revise and resubmit. The other 10 decisions were unchanged.

August 16, 2006:

The Officers of the Society for Financial Studies are proposing to make two changes to the by-laws. The first allows the society to compensate the journal’s editors. The second creates a formula for automatically increasing the number of editors as the submission flow increases. Members of the SFS are invited to comment on these proposals in the forum and to vote on them using the ballot that will be included in the next issue of the RFS.

August 14, 2006:

This was a busy weekend for the RFS in the New York Times which published two articles mentioning the journal! Alas, one incorrectly implied that the RFS is owned by the Yale School of Management. In truth, the California non-profit Society for Financial Studies ownes the RFS. A request has been sent to the New York Times asking for a correction. Update: The NYT has graciously agreed to print one next Sunday.

August 10, 2006:

The Society for Financial Studies (which owns the Review of Financial Studies) and the Western Finance Association are in talks about the possibility of merging the two organizations. Those involved would like to get the profession’s feedback regarding this possibility and encourage any and all interested parties to post their views on the RFS forum. Among the issues being discussed: What are the costs and benefits of a merger? If a merger takes place what should the new organization look like? If a merger takes place what new projects should be developed? Should the new organization run additional conferences or publish additional journals? Would the profession be better served by having each organization add new outlets and forums separately rather than as a single entity? Responses to these and other questions are welcome.

June 26, 2006:

The RFS is pleased to announce this year’s award winners! The envelope please:

Referees of the Year:

  • Francis Longstaff, UCLA.
  • Allen Poteshman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Michael J. Brennan Awards for the best papers published in Volume 18:

  • 1st Prize: Peter M. DeMarzo, “The Pooling and Tranching of Securities: A Model of Informed Intermediation.”
  • 2nd Prize: Markus K. Brunnermeier, “Information Leakage and Market Efficiency.”

Other News: Starting with referee requests going out today the RFS will pay $150 for timely reports. To cover this additional expense submission fees will also go up by $50. Appeals will now cost $700 to maintain the current 4:1 cost ratio between regular submissions and appeals.

June 13, 2006:

NOTICE REGARDING THE WFA’S: There is an error in the published program for the Western Finance Association’s annual meeting in Keystone. The SFS annual meeting will take place from 5:00 to 6:00pm in Grays Peak 1. The program incorrectly lists the starting time as 4:00pm.

May 2, 2006:

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Gitit Gur Gershgoren has accepted the journal’s post-doctoral position. She is graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder and will start working with the RFS this July. We are looking forward to her arrival and wish her all the best in her new post.

April 24, 2006:

We are pleased to announce nominations for this year’s openings on the board of Associate Editors: Gurdip Bakshi (University of Maryland), Thomas Chemmanur (Boston College), Tarun Chordia (Emory University), Lubos Pastor (University of Chicago), Jeffrey Pontiff (Boston College), and Allen Poteshman (University of Illinois). Our congratulations to all.

April 10, 2006:

When the RFS was established its founders created a rotating editorial board to help ensure that the journal’s would always be an intellectually diverse research outlet. As part of this process we are sad to announce the departure of Yacine Aït Sahalia, Robert McDonald, and Terrance Odean. We all wish them well with their future endeavors. At the same time we are also happy to announce that Paolo Fulghieri and Raman Uppal have been nominated to start as editors on July 1. Our heartfelt thanks to all involved and their efforts on the journal’s behalf.

March 29, 2006:

The RFS will soon bid farewell to the current holder of the journal’s post-doctoral position, Dr. Armen Hovsepian. Bad news for us, is good news for him as he is taking on a new full time job. I and the rest of the journal’s editors wish him all the best.

The post-doctoral position comes with the title Advisory Editor and is available for up to two years starting on July 1. The advisory editor helps the journal’s editors find referees for nearly every new submission. The pay is awful (although better than a typical Ph.D. student’s stipend) and the office space that comes with the job is nothing to write home about either. If you have any additional questions you should either contact Matthew Spiegel or Armen Hovsepian. Interested applicants should send a copy of their vita to Tricia Cushing along with the names of three references we can contact.

March 10, 2006:

Oxford University Press (OUP) asked me (Matthew Spiegel) to nominate two articles from the RFS for a book they plan celebrating “100 years of Journals Publishing.” Ultimately, this book will hold what OUP perceives to be the 100 best papers ever published in any of their journals. Clearly, selecting just two papers from among the many ground breaking articles that have appeared in the RFS is far too big a job for any one person. Fortunately, I had help. The journal’s executive editors past and present had, in my view, a very interesting and perhaps nostalgic discussion about the many papers published over the years.

Our discussion covered not just citations, but how papers changed the way people thought about problems, and which papers had an impact at the time but are now part of literatures that have faded away. In the end, it is (of course) impossible to really say any two papers are the “best.” With that caveat in mind, the journal’s executive editors have nominated Andrew Lo and Craig MacKinlay’s 1988 article, “Stock Market Prices do not Follow Random Walks: Evidence From a Simple Specification Test” and Jonathan Berk’s 1995 article, “A Critique of Size-Related Anomalies.” Our congratulations to all three authors! However, while I am happy to convey this news to our readership I should caution that there is no guarantee either article will eventually appear in OUP’s book. OUP publishes a LOT of journals and many will, I suspect, be shut out and others will only see one of their two nominees in the book. Nevertheless, I thought our readers would like to hear about this even if in the end nothing comes of it.

February 14, 2006:

We are pleased to have University of Illinois Professor Michael Weisbach join our group of Editors! Our congratulations to him (and us for getting him to say yes!). His addition helps ensure that the RFS will continue to provide each submission with an editor that has the time and expertise to ensure its proper handling.

January 13, 2006:

Wondering about the seemingly minuscule acceptance rate? The acceptance rate that appears on the home page is based on submissions since July 1, 2005. That means it equals all papers submitted on or after July 1, 2005 that have already been accepted divided by all new submissions since that date. If you want a better indicator of what the long run acceptance rate may be go to the forum, click on General Discussion and then RFS Monthly Statistics.