How to Write a Review of Financial Studies Cover Letter (With Template)

Source: SFS RFS submission page, RFS Instructions to Authors, accessed June 2026.

The order matters because RFS editors are scanning for contribution density first and compliance signals second. A letter that names the contribution, declares exclusivity, and confirms code release is easy to clear at the technical and desk-screen stages.

Two sentences carry most of the compliance weight. Use them close to verbatim.

Non-duplication and exclusive submission: "This manuscript is submitted solely to the Review of Financial Studies; it has not been published previously and is not under consideration or accepted for publication, in whole or in part, elsewhere."

All-authors-approved: "All authors have read and approved this submission and agree to its content."

RFS evaluates papers "on the understanding that they have been submitted solely to it and that they have not been previously published or previously accepted for publication." Putting the declaration in your own words signals you read the policy rather than pasting a generic template from another field.

The opening sentence is where most RFS editor letters succeed or fail. Compare a weak opener against a strong one, line by line:

Avoid the weak opener: "We investigate the relationship between two variables in financial markets using a large dataset."
Use the strong opener: "Whether a given mechanism causes an outcome or merely reflects a confounder has remained unresolved in this subfield; using a specific shock and identification design, we show that the mechanism is causal, which revises the standard explanation."

The weak version has no question, no result, and no identification, so an RFS co-editor cannot tell whether it is a top-3 contribution or a correlation exercise. The strong version names the unresolved question, the identification strategy, and the consequence in one sentence. At a top-3 finance journal the identification strategy is part of the contribution, so naming it in the opener is what separates a desk-screen pass from a routine rejection.

A journal-specific RFS opener you can adapt reads like this:

We show that intermediary balance-sheet constraints, identified from a regulatory shock to dealer capital, transmit to asset prices through a channel the prevailing explanation cannot account for.

That single sentence states the finance question, the identification, and the contribution, which is exactly what an RFS editor needs before deciding whether to commit referee time.

RFS publishes full-length research articles in financial economics, broadly defined. It is effectively a single-type journal for cover-letter purposes: there is no separate "letter," "brief report," or "communication" track to flag, so you do not need an article-type line. What does change is the submission stage.

The resubmission case is the one authors most often mishandle. RFS asks for one letter to the editor plus a separate, anonymous letter to each referee, and a single de-anonymized response file is a common reason a resubmission bounces back.

Beyond the four core jobs, RFS gives you two explicit levers and one separate upload.

• Suggest a handling editor. RFS invites a preferred editor and says it takes the suggestion into account subject to workload, expertise, and conflicts. A detailed list of suggested referees is not required in the cover letter, because RFS selects referees from its own pool; match your editor suggestion to your subfield rather than to seniority.

• Request reviewer exclusions. You may ask that the paper not be sent to a particular reviewer.

Keep it to 1 to 2 reviewers with a one-line reason; long exclusion lists of 3 or more referees read as defensiveness.

• Competing interests and disclosures go in the system, not the letter. RFS requires a disclosure statement under the SFS author disclosure policy, uploaded separately in the submission steps.

Editorial conflicts (same institution, co-author within ten years, former PhD advisor or student, close friend, relative) are tracked at editor assignment, so name them accurately rather than hiding them.

A Review of Financial Studies submission package check verifies the letter, the declarations, and the anonymization before you upload.

Here is the part authors rarely see. When the editorial office routes a new RFS submission, the Editor-in-Chief assigns it to one of the seven co-editors while avoiding editorial conflicts, and that co-editor spends a few minutes deciding whether the paper clears the top-3 contribution bar before committing referee time.

We read the abstract and the editor letter together: the abstract tells us what you did, and the letter tells us why it is a top-3 finance contribution rather than a competent replication. If the letter only restates the abstract, it answers a question the editor did not ask.

The editor is deciding whether to spend scarce referee capacity, and a letter that names the unresolved question and the identification design makes that decision faster and more favorable.

In our pre-submission review work with Review of Financial Studies submissions, four cover-letter and packaging patterns predict trouble at the desk or technical stage before a referee is ever assigned. Each is testable against your own draft.

The abstract-in-disguise editor letter. A large share of the RFS editor letters we review simply paraphrase the 100-word abstract. They describe the dataset and the regressions but never make the editorial case for why this is a top-3 finance contribution. The fix is to lead the letter with the unresolved question and the one-sentence result, then stop. If your editor letter and your abstract say the same thing in different words, the letter is doing no work.

Identification buried below the contribution claim. At RFS the identification strategy is part of the contribution, not a methods footnote. We repeatedly see letters that assert a causal result while the identification design is invisible until deep in the manuscript. The fix is to name the shock, instrument, or design in the opening sentence of the editor letter, because an RFS co-editor uses that phrase to decide whether the causal claim is credible enough to send out.

Blinding leaks that survive into the anonymized manuscript. RFS double-blind review depends on full anonymization, and the most common failure we flag is author identity surviving in self-citation patterns ("as we showed in our earlier paper"), acknowledgement lines, funding-grant numbers, or supplementary appendices that link to an SSRN profile or a personal page. A cover letter cannot rescue a manuscript that de-anonymizes itself. Strip identity from the manuscript, the title in the PDF, and any letters to referees, and keep names only on the separate title page.

Silence on the code-and-data condition. RFS requires authors to publicly release all code underlying a published paper, and if that condition cannot be met it must be flagged in the editor letter on initial submission. We see otherwise strong submissions that say nothing about code, then hit friction at the conditional-acceptance stage when the release cannot be finalized.

The fix is one sentence in the editor letter stating that you will release all code, or naming the specific exception up front so the editor knows before review rather than after.

These are all fixable before submission. A Review of Financial Studies anonymization and declaration check scans the package for blinding leaks, missing declarations, and code-sharing gaps in a couple of minutes.