Journal of Empirical Finance

The Journal of Empirical Finance is a financial economics journal whose aim is to publish high quality articles in empirical finance. Empirical finance is interpreted broadly to include any type of empirical work in financial economics, financial econometrics, and also theoretical work with clear empirical implications, even when there is no empirical analysis. The Journal welcomes articles in all fields of finance, such as asset pricing, corporate finance, financial econometrics, banking, international finance, microstructure, behavioural finance, etc.



The Editorial Team is willing to take risks on innovative research, controversial papers, and unusual approaches. We are also particularly interested in work produced by young scholars. The composition of the editorial board reflects such goals.



Editorial Policy

We are committed to fast turnaround times. Since 2016, our goal is to make most decisions on first submissions within 10 weeks.



All papers are handled by one of the main editors. For each paper, the editor chooses one of three options:

The editor makes a decision on the paper without involving additional reviewers;

The editor directly selects one or more ad hoc reviewers;

The editor assigns the paper to an associate editor, who then selects one or more ad hoc reviewers and makes a recommendation to the editor.

In all cases, the editor is responsible for the final decision on the paper.



All first submissions require payment of a submission fee. The submission fee is not refundable. In particular, the submission fee will not be refunded if the paper is "desk rejected" (i.e. the editor rejects the paper without involving additional reviewers) or if the editors are unable to secure reviewers for the paper.



We do not pre-screen papers or ideas; authors have to submit their papers and pay the submission fee to receive an evaluation. Please note that, due to the exceptionally large number of high-quality submissions, the hurdle is very high: we currently reject about 85% of all submissions, of which 40% are rejected by the editors without involving further reviewers and with no detailed feedback offered. We thus recommend authors to be conservative in their submission decisions, as most submissions will lead to rejection.



As a guideline for authors, here we list some of the most common reasons for desk rejections (please note that this list is not exhaustive):

The paper is a better fit for Accounting, Computational, Mathematical Finance, Operations, Statistics, or Econometrics journals.

The paper is a better fit for academic journals with a more practitioner orientation.

The topic or the application is too narrow, being of interest to only a small group of researchers.

The quality of the analysis falls short of the standards expected by the Journal.

The paper is poorly written and/or formatted.