jf-writing-style
Writing Style & Exposition (jf-writing-style)
When to trigger
- The introduction does not deliver the question, finding, and magnitude in the first page
- Prose is dense, jargon-heavy, or written for a subfield rather than the broad AFA reader
- The main finding is buried; the reader has to work to extract the takeaway
- Sentences hedge so much the claim disappears
JF house voice: accessible, precise, general-interest
JF is the AFA flagship, read across asset pricing, corporate finance, banking, microstructure, and household finance by 8,000+ readers. Writing must be accessible to a finance reader outside your subfield while staying precise. The manuscript also faces a 60-page limit (≥1.5 spacing, 12-pt font), so lead with economics and offload technical depth to the Internet Appendix (bundled at the end of the same PDF; see jf-internet-appendix) rather than padding the body.
The JF introduction (first ~3 pages do the work)
In order: (1) the question and why it matters — general-interest, concrete; (2) what you do — design/data/test in plain terms; (3) what you find — headline result with its economic magnitude in interpretable units; (4) why it is credible — the source of variation or the test; (5) contribution — the closest papers and your delta (see jf-literature-positioning); (6) brief roadmap. A reader who stops at page 3 should know the question, the answer, its size, and why to believe it.