Literature Positioning (rfs-literature-positioning)

When to trigger

• The related-work section is a list ("X did A, Y did B") with no synthesis
• You cannot state your contribution as a single crisp delta
• A reader asks "how is this different from [recent RFS/JF/JFE paper]?"
• The novelty claim from rfs-topic-selection needs to be defended against the literature

How RFS reviewers read positioning

RFS referees and editors are typically the authors of the papers you cite. The handling editor pool is concrete — Executive Editor Tarun Ramadorai plus editors such as Viral Acharya, Xavier Giroud, Andrey Malenko, Anna Pavlova, Clemens Sialm, David Sraer, and Jessica Wachter — so the person screening an intermediation, household-finance, or asset-pricing paper may well be a primary author in that literature. Positioning is judged on whether you (1) know the current frontier, (2) cite the right primary sources rather than secondary surveys, and (3) state a delta that is real and defensible — not rhetorical. When you build on an RFS-defining result (e.g., Brunnermeier–Pedersen 2009 on the liquidity-funding spiral, RFS 22(6)), cite the RFS original, not a later survey that paraphrases it.

The contribution must clear two bars simultaneously:

• Against the literature — what do we now know that we did not before?
• Against the closest 2–3 papers — what specifically do you do that they could not?

Positioning structure