JFQA Literature Positioning (jfqa-literature-positioning)

Use this skill to locate a JFQA manuscript against the finance literature so the contribution is unmistakable to the reviewers and the assigned Managing Editor.

What JFQA expects

• A tight positioning paragraph, not a literature-review chapter. State what is known, the specific gap, and what this paper adds.
• Engagement with the right finance subfield frontier — corporate finance, investments/asset pricing, microstructure, or institutions — and with the closest recent JFQA / finance-flagship work.
• Honest delineation from near-neighbor papers: say explicitly how your sample, design, mechanism, or result differs.

Process

1. Identify the 5-10 closest papers in your subfield and the one or two that a referee will say "this is already done."
2. Write the contrast in one or two sentences each: what they did, what you do differently, why the difference matters economically.
3. Tie the contribution to JFQA's quantitative ethos — a new measurement, a sharper identification, a model with testable implications, or a result that overturns/refines a stylized fact.
4. Avoid claiming "first to study X" unless you can defend it; finance is crowded.

Anti-patterns