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rof-topic-selection

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Use when judging whether a finance idea clears the Review of Finance (RoF) general-interest bar before any estimation or modeling — first-order question, fit with the journal's empirical-and-theoretical scope, and the top-three-finance-journal standard RoF referees apply.

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/Review-of-Finance-Skills/skills/rof-topic-selection/SKILL.md

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Topic Selection (rof-topic-selection)

When to trigger

  • The question feels incremental or sub-field-only ("yet another anomaly")
  • You are unsure whether RoF (vs. a specialist field journal) is the right home
  • You have data or a model but no first-order finance question yet
  • You want to gauge fit before paying the submission fee

The RoF bar

RoF publishes general-interest finance at the level of the top-three finance journals, as the official journal of the European Finance Association (EFA). Its referees are explicitly asked to apply top-three-finance-journal standards, so the screening question is "would this interest the broad finance audience and survive a top-three referee?" RoF is genuinely both empirical and theoretical — asset pricing, corporate finance, banking, household finance, microstructure on the empirical side; asset-pricing theory, security/contract design, microstructure theory on the theory side. A clean theoretical result with a sharp economic message fits as well as a credible empirical finding.

Fit tests

  1. First-order question — does the answer change how finance researchers think, not just add a decimal to a known coefficient?
  2. Generality — is the lesson portable beyond one market, one country-year, one dataset?
  3. Standard — could a top-three-finance referee call this publishable there? RoF aims for that quality.
  4. Empirical vs. theory clarity — an empirical paper needs credible identification (→ rof-identification-strategy); a theory paper needs clean assumptions, a non-obvious result, and economic interpretation.
  5. Process fit — RoF charges a real fee (EUR 350; EUR 300 for EFA members) and runs a two-round process; a paper needing five rounds to become interesting is a poor fit.

Two-candidate worked screen

Illustrative. Candidate A: "Do Italian cooperative banks lend differently?" — single-country, descriptive; fails the generality test unless rebuilt around what cooperative ownership reveals about lending under soft information everywhere, with a cross-country counterpart. As posed, it is a field-journal paper. Candidate B: "Does deposit-insurance design change bank risk-taking? Evidence from staggered EU coverage harmonization" — institution-driven variation across many countries, a first-order question with both an empirical and a theoretical audience inside RoF's scope. Verdict: B clears the bar as-is; A needs the reframe before the fee is worth paying.

Where RoF-fit questions come from

  • Institutional variation Europe generates naturally: directive transpositions staggered across member states, ECB policy innovations, national supervisory experiments — shock designs a US-only dataset cannot offer, aimed at universal forces.
  • Frontier areas the EFA community is actively building: sustainable and climate finance, fintech and digital payments, household finance — still subject to the general-interest framing test, not exempt from it.
  • The EFA annual-meeting program as a barometer: sessions dense with top-three authors mark where the standard is currently being set and where the closest competitors are.

Pre-fee screening questions

  • Would the paper stay interesting if the headline coefficient halved? Interest that survives magnitude risk is the safer bet at a two-round journal.
  • Can you state the lesson without naming the country or the dataset? If not, generality is missing.
  • Is there both a theory reader and an empirical reader who care? RoF's scope is genuinely both, and the broadest papers speak to each.
  • Is the natural experiment yours alone for long? If competitors loom, the Fast-Track calculus enters early (→ rof-submission).

Anti-patterns

  • A within-subfield estimate with no broad finance lesson — reads as a field-journal paper.
  • A theory model with a foregone-conclusion result dressed in heavy notation.
  • "First to study X in country Y" novelty with no first-order stake.
  • Choosing RoF to dodge fees elsewhere — fit, not cost, should drive the choice.

Output format

【Question】one sentence, plain language
【Type】empirical / theoretical / both
【First-order?】[Y/N] — why
【Top-three-standard?】[Y/N]
【General lesson】beyond this setting: ...
【Verdict】RoF-fit / redirect / reframe
【Next step】rof-contribution-framing