Rejected from Review of Financial Studies? The 6 Best Journals to Submit Next

Your next venue depends on why RFS said no. If the rejection was about fit or a crowded subfield rather than the contribution itself, a sister top-3 journal may read the paper differently. If it was about identification or contribution, move down a tier where the bar on novelty is lower but the bar on execution is not.

Source: AFA Journal Statistics, SFS RFS Statistics, Review of Finance submission fees, JFQA submissions, Management Science submission guidelines, Journal of Banking & Finance, accessed June 2026.

1. Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial Economics (lateral top-3 move)

RFS, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Financial Economics are the top-3 finance journals, and all three publish across the full scope at roughly the same selectivity. A lateral move makes sense only when RFS rejected you for reasons that are editor-specific rather than paper-specific: a poor editor-subfield match, a crowded recent issue in your area, or a contribution framing that a different editorial culture might read more generously.

JF leans toward AFA society anchoring; JFE is Elsevier-published with an empirical, editor-driven character. A paper RFS desk-rejected on contribution will usually be desk-rejected at the other two for the same reason, so be honest about which kind of "no" you received.

Best for: Papers where the rejection was about fit or editor match, and the underlying contribution is genuinely top-3 caliber.

2. Review of Finance

Review of Finance, the European Finance Association's flagship (also published by Oxford), is the most common single step down from the top three. The selectivity is comparable on paper (about 6.4 percent acceptance), but the bar on cross-field significance is calibrated slightly lower, and the journal is known for fast, decisive first decisions (mean around 44 days). If RFS rejected the paper as "solid but not a top-3 contribution," Review of Finance is the natural next stop.

Best for: Strong finance papers that are one notch below the top-3 novelty bar but still rigorous and well-identified.

3. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis

JFQA (Cambridge, on behalf of the University of Washington) publishes theoretical and empirical financial economics with a quantitative emphasis. Acceptance is around 6 percent and median first decisions land near 41 days. JFQA is a strong home for methodologically careful empirical work that may have been edged out at RFS by a marginally thinner economic contribution.

Best for: Empirical or methods-heavy finance papers where the econometrics are the strength.

4. Management Science (Finance department)

Management Science is a broad, department-structured business journal, and its Finance department publishes finance research alongside operations, marketing, and information-systems work. The submission fee is unusually low ($89) and the journal targets roughly 90-day first decisions. It suits finance papers with an interdisciplinary or methods angle that travels beyond a pure-finance readership.

Best for: Finance work with a modeling, behavioral, or interdisciplinary component that reaches a general management-science audience.

5. Journal of Banking & Finance

JBF is one of the largest finance journals by volume (around 1,500 submissions a year) and is the specialist home for banking, intermediation, regulation, systemic risk, and market microstructure. It is the right move when RFS rejected the paper as too narrow for a general top-3 readership but the work is a real contribution within banking or financial institutions.

Best for: Banking, intermediation, and regulation papers where subfield depth matters more than general-finance breadth.

6. Your SFS sister journal or a top field venue

Because RFS is an SFS journal, an asset-pricing paper can go to the Review of Asset Pricing Studies and a corporate-finance paper to the Review of Corporate Finance Studies.

These are fresh submissions, not transfers, but they keep the work inside a familiar editorial culture and the same anonymized-manuscript conventions (RFS itself caps the abstract at 100 words on the first page of the blinded file, and the sister journals follow the same SFS house style).

For very specialized work, a top field journal (the Journal of Corporate Finance, the Journal of Financial Markets, the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking) may value the contribution more than a generalist editor did. Where the SFS sister-journal route wins is editorial-culture continuity; where it falls short is reach, since each carries less general-finance visibility than the top three.

If you want to see the kind of paper they publish, recent RFS-cluster DOIs such as 10.1093/rfs/hhac123, 10.1093/rfs/hhad145, and 10.1093/rfs/hhae167 show the contribution bar in practice.

Best for: Papers whose contribution is primarily important within one subfield rather than across finance.

In finance there is no portfolio transfer system. Unlike Nature or Cell Press, no finance journal forwards your manuscript and its referee reports to a lower-tier venue. The "cascade" is the field's submission ladder, and you descend it manually: each rejection ends one submission, and you start the next from scratch, re-anonymizing for the new journal's double-blind process and re-framing the cover letter. That is more work, but it gives you full control over which rejection reason you fix and how fast you move.

The single decision that drives the whole ladder is which rejection reason RFS gave you. Map it before you choose a venue:

Source: Manusights editorial routing logic, cross-checked against SFS RFS statistics and the alternative-venue submission pages, June 2026.

Desk-rejected on fit or scope? Step laterally to JF or JFE only if the contribution is genuinely top-3, otherwise step down to Review of Finance or JFQA where the novelty bar is calibrated lower. A scope rejection is the easiest to act on because the science is not in question.

Rejected on the contribution itself? Don't just blast the same paper down the ladder. The next tier still demands a real contribution; only the cross-field significance bar relaxes. Strengthen the economic question or the marginal contribution before resubmitting, or move to a specialist venue (JBF, a field journal) where subfield depth is the contribution.

Rejected on identification or methods after review? Fix the identification strategy and robustness tests before resubmitting anywhere. These issues will resurface at every refereed finance journal, and JFQA and Review of Finance referees are no more forgiving of an endogeneity gap than RFS referees were.

Asset pricing or corporate finance specifically? Consider the SFS sister journals (Review of Asset Pricing Studies, Review of Corporate Finance Studies) as a same-family step that keeps you inside the editorial culture you already know.

In our pre-submission review work with Review of Financial Studies submissions, the rejections we see most often cluster into four patterns, and three of them are fixable before the paper ever reaches the next journal on the ladder.

The contribution is real but framed as incremental. RFS rejects far more papers for a contribution that does not clear the top-3 bar than for any technical flaw. Across our RFS pre-submission reviews, the most common version of this is a strong empirical result framed in the abstract and introduction as "we extend the literature" rather than as a question the field genuinely could not answer before.

The fix lives in the contribution framing: the introduction has to state, in one sentence, what a reader now knows that they could not know from the existing top-5 papers on the topic. We routinely see manuscripts where the contribution paragraph names the prior papers but never states the marginal advance over them.

This is the single highest-leverage edit before a lateral move to JF or JFE, where the same framing will fail for the same reason.

The identification strategy does not survive the obvious endogeneity challenge. Manuscripts coming through our pre-submission review pipeline for RFS most often lose referees on the identification strategy, not the headline result. RFS referees in corporate finance and banking are trained to ask "what is the counterfactual, and why is your variation exogenous to it."

We see papers that lean on a single difference-in-differences specification without a parallel-trends test, a placebo, or an instrument whose exclusion restriction is defended rather than asserted. Because this is a methods objection, it follows the paper to Review of Finance and JFQA unchanged.

Strengthening the robustness tests (a falsification test, an alternative identification, a sensitivity analysis around the key assumption) before resubmitting is what separates a paper that moves down one tier from one that bounces at three journals in a row.

The data or sample cannot support the generality the abstract claims. A recurring pattern in our RFS reviews is a mismatch between the sample and the claim: a single-country or single-exchange dataset, a short post-crisis window, or a sample period that ends before the phenomenon the paper claims to explain. RFS editors screen for whether the data and sample actually license the conclusion.

When they do not, the realistic next venue is one where the narrower claim is the contribution (JBF for a banking-system sample, a field journal for a single-market study) rather than a top-3 journal where breadth is expected.

The cover letter and submission package leak author identity. RFS uses double-blind review, and across our pre-submission reviews the most common avoidable rejection-adjacent problem is incomplete blinding: self-citations written in the first person, an acknowledgements footnote left in, or a supplementary appendix that links to an author's SSRN page.

This rarely causes the rejection itself, but it forces a re-anonymization round that costs weeks, and it carries over to every other double-blind venue on the ladder. Re-anonymizing cleanly for the next journal is a five-minute check that authors skip under deadline pressure. Run a Review of Financial Studies anonymization and fit check before you resubmit so the same blinding gap does not cost you another decision cycle.

The temptation after a top-3 rejection is to re-upload the same PDF to the next journal that afternoon. Resist it. A finance rejection almost always names a reason, and the reason travels with the paper unless you act on it. A scope or fit rejection means move journals and re-frame; a contribution rejection means strengthen the marginal-advance argument before moving; an identification or robustness rejection means real work on the methods before any resubmission, because the next set of referees will raise the same objection.

Be honest about which kind of "no" you got. If the editor wrote that the paper is sound but not a top-3 contribution, that is a routing problem and Review of Finance or JFQA is the answer. If the referees doubted the identification, no amount of re-routing fixes it. And remember that finance journals essentially never reconsider a paper they have already rejected, so re-submitting the same manuscript to RFS is not a real option. The decision is final for that paper at that journal.