rfs-workflow
RFS Manuscript Workflow (rfs-workflow)
Overview
This is the router. It does not replace any specialized skill — it tells you which rfs- skill to use right now*.
Default assumption: unless the user says otherwise, treat the target as The Review of Financial Studies (RFS) — founded 1988 (first editor Michael Brennan), published by Oxford University Press for the Society for Financial Studies (SFS), one of the "top-3" finance journals alongside the Journal of Finance (AFA) and the Journal of Financial Economics (Elsevier). The current Executive Editor is Tarun Ramadorai (LSE / Imperial, term 2024–2027); the editor team includes Viral Acharya (NYU), Xavier Giroud (Columbia), Andrey Malenko (Boston College), Anna Pavlova (LBS), Clemens Sialm (UT Austin), David Sraer (Berkeley), and Jessica Wachter (Penn). RFS shares JF/JFE's high causal-inference and asset-pricing bar but has two distinctive levers JF/JFE do not share: (1) it is the first finance/economics journal to run Registered Reports (pre-results review; see Karolyi's 2014 editorial "Kick-Starting the Review Process," RFS 27(2)), and (2) it offers dual submission with the SFS Cavalcade conference. The governing tension at RFS is always novelty AND rigor — never one without the other.
When to trigger
- The user asks "what should I do next?"
- A draft arrives and you must diagnose the current bottleneck
- The user is thrashing between empirics, writing, and revision
- A decision letter from RFS arrives and you must switch into rebuttal mode
- The user is unsure whether the paper is novel enough OR rigorous enough for RFS