Review of Financial Studies Response to Reviewers: How to Win the Multi-Round R&R (2026)
How to write a point-by-point response to reviewers for the Review of Financial Studies, where a revise-and-resubmit is closer to permission to submit anew than an acceptance, and identification is the bar.
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These pages work best when they behave like tools, not essays. Use the quick structure first, then apply it to the exact journal and manuscript situation.
Question | What to do |
|---|---|
Use this page for | Building a point-by-point response that is easy for reviewers and editors to trust. |
Start with | State the reviewer concern clearly, then pair each response with the exact evidence or revision. |
Common mistake | Sounding defensive or abstract instead of specific about what changed. |
Best next step | Turn the response into a visible checklist or matrix before you finalize the letter. |
Quick answer: A Review of Financial Studies response to reviewers is a two-letter, identification-first rebuttal built for a journal that treats a revise-and-resubmit as permission to submit anew, not an offer of acceptance.
Write a separate letter to the editor and an anonymous letter to each referee, give the table, page and line to indicate where every change lives so a referee can verify it without hunting, and answer an identification or endogeneity concern with a cleaner research design, not more robustness tables.
The assigned referee can change between rounds, the journal aims for a decision in two or three rounds, and your replication package is verified by Data Editors before the paper publishes.
Start with the Review of Financial Studies submission readiness check before you resubmit, or work through this guide by hand. For broader cluster context, see the Review of Financial Studies submission guide.
What does a Review of Financial Studies response to reviewers require?
The Manusights Review of Financial Studies rebuttal scan. This guide tells you what the editor and the assigned referees look for in an RFS response to referees. The scan tells you whether YOUR response letter passes that check before you resubmit through the SFS system. In our pre-submission review work with Review of Financial Studies manuscripts, the patterns below are the same ones referees flag when they re-read a revision. Your manuscript never enters AI training data, and we delete it within 24 hours.
Three things make a Review of Financial Studies rebuttal different from a generic one:
- A revise-and-resubmit is not an offer to revise. The journal is explicit that an R&R is closer to permission to work on your paper and submit it anew. Your unconditional chance of publication is not much better than a fresh submission, and you must convince both the editor and the assigned referee.
- The assigned referee can change between rounds. The new referee's view of acceptability may differ from the feedback that produced your R&R, so you cannot write only to the reviewer you already know.
- Finance is an identification-first field. The bar for an empirical revision is a cleaner causal design, not a thicker appendix of robustness tables.
How we built this guide: we reviewed the SFS editorial-process, submission, and code-and-data-sharing documentation, we checked every figure against the published RFS statistics, and we analyzed our own pre-submission reviews of finance R&R letters. Every claim below traces to a primary source or our review corpus.
Use this guide when you have an R&R in hand and need to know what the editor and the assigned referee will actually weigh. With a 2025 acceptance rate near 8 percent (6 percent in 2023 and 2024), the revision you are about to write is the difference between publication and a rejection on revision.
Element | What the Review of Financial Studies expects | What referees flag at re-review |
|---|---|---|
Letters | Separate editor letter plus an anonymous letter to each referee | One free-form letter answering all referees together |
Identification | A cleaner design that addresses the endogeneity directly | More robustness tables that leave the causal claim untouched |
Specificity | Table, page, and line number for every change | "We have updated the analysis" with no location |
Replication | A code and data trail planned during the R&R | A scramble to build the package at conditional acceptance |
Tone to the editor | Substantive, concise, non-defensive | Arguing the referee was wrong instead of doing the work |
Consistency | Same answer to a point raised by two referees | Two different sample windows for the same concern |
Source: SFS Review of Financial Studies submission, review, and code-and-data-sharing policies, accessed June 2026.
The copyable Review of Financial Studies rebuttal template
RFS expects separate letters, so your response is not one document but a short editor letter plus one anonymous letter per referee. Copy this skeleton, then replace the bracketed text with your own changes. Keep the referee text and your reply in two distinct fonts or colors so the editor can scan the package fast.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor,
Thank you for the opportunity to revise our manuscript the manuscript title
(RFS-[ID]). The central change in this revision is a cleaner
identification strategy: we now exploit [natural experiment /
instrument / discontinuity] to address the endogeneity Referee 1
and Referee 2 both raised. We have also [added the new test /
extended the sample / restructured the contribution]. Separate
anonymous letters to each referee follow. Referee comments are in
bold and our replies in plain text, with the revised-paper table,
page, and line numbers given for every change.
----------------------------------------------------------------
LETTER TO REFEREE 1 (anonymous)
Comment 1.1: "The baseline regression does not address the
obvious endogeneity between [X] and [Y]; the result may be
driven by reverse causality or an omitted variable."
Response: We agree this is the core concern. Rather than adding
further controls, we now identify the effect using [the 2014
regulatory change / a shift-share instrument / a regression
discontinuity at the [threshold]]. The new design appears in
Section 4.2 and Table 4. The first-stage F-statistic is [value]
and the effect survives. See page 18, lines 4 to 22.
Comment 1.2: "Standard errors are not clustered at the level of
treatment."
Response: We now cluster at the [firm / industry-year] level.
The point estimate is unchanged and remains significant at the
1% level. See Table 3, note (c), and page 15, lines 9 to 14.
----------------------------------------------------------------
LETTER TO REFEREE 2 (anonymous)
Comment 2.1: "The economic magnitude is not interpreted."
Response: We have added an economic-significance paragraph: a
one-standard-deviation change in [X] moves [Y] by [magnitude],
roughly [benchmark]. See page 21, lines 6 to 15.
We believe the revised paper now resolves the identification
concern and we look forward to your decision.
Sincerely,
[Corresponding author, on behalf of all authors]The template carries the four tokens that referees actually scan for: a letter to the editor, a per-referee structure, explicit action language ("we now identify", "we have added", "we now cluster"), and a table, page, and line reference for every change.
The table-page-line rule: cite the location of every change
Pin every revision to a coordinate. Give the table number, the page, and the line for each change, and name the specific regression, figure, or appendix you touched. This is the single most-cited rebuttal failure we see across finance R&R letters.
The mechanics are simple, and the payoff is referee attention:
- A referee forced to hunt for your new identification table treats the gap itself as a tell that the result is weak.
- A referee who jumps straight to Table 4 and page 18, lines 4 to 22, sees the instrument and the first-stage F-statistic at once, and re-reviews more favorably.
- Use the table and line numbers from the revised file, not the prior round.
- When a result moves to the Internet Appendix rather than the main paper, say so explicitly.
Never write "we have addressed this in the analysis" without a location.
Reviewer-text vs author-response typography
Set the referee's words apart from yours on sight. Put each referee comment in bold or a colored text box, then keep your reply in plain regular text directly beneath it.
Why this matters at RFS specifically: the editor reads the editor letter plus every per-referee letter as one package. When comment and reply blur together, you lose the attention you most need on the identification argument. The editor is deciding whether you and the assigned referee can converge inside the journal's two-or-three-round goal, and a letter the editor can follow at a glance is the one that converges.
Tone calibration: how to phrase the hard replies
The editor reads your tone across every referee letter at once, and the assigned referee may be new this round. A defensive reply to Referee 1 colors how the editor reads your answer to Referee 2. Calibrate.
Bad (defensive or vague) | Better (substantive and gracious) |
|---|---|
"The referee misunderstands our identification." | "We did not make the identification explicit; we now exploit [the 2014 regulatory change] in Section 4.2 and report the first-stage in Table 4." |
"Endogeneity is not a problem in our setting." | "We agree endogeneity is the central concern. We now address it with [an instrument / a discontinuity] rather than additional controls; see Table 4, page 18." |
"We have run additional robustness checks." | "Robustness alone does not resolve the omitted-variable concern, so we have changed the design to [approach]; the robustness tables now appear in the Internet Appendix." |
"The other referee did not raise this." | "We appreciate the point and have reconciled it with the related concern from Referee 2; both are answered with [the single change] on page 18." |
"Our result is economically obvious." | "We have added the economic magnitude the referee requested: a one-SD change in [X] moves [Y] by [magnitude], page 21." |
The pattern that works: concede where the referee is right, change the research design rather than padding the appendix, point to the exact table and line, and push back only on a request that is genuinely out of scope, with a reason and an alternative.
The Review of Financial Studies referee culture you are writing into
The Review of Financial Studies runs a depth-oriented, multi-round R&R process. A handling editor or associate editor owns the paper from desk triage through every round, drawing on a deep finance reviewer pool. Most editors keep handling resubmissions for about a year after their term ends, so the relationship you build in the editor letter compounds across rounds.
The clock has two distinct phases:
- First decision is fast for finance: the 2025 median was about 33 days (35 days in 2023), backed by a refund guarantee that returns the submission fee if the journal takes longer than 120 days to decide.
- The long clock is the revision phase. Full review with revisions commonly runs 12 to 24 months end to end, across the two or three rounds the journal sets as its goal (a goal, not a promise; harder papers run longer).
The decision language is unusually blunt
This is the line that should change how you write. A revise-and-resubmit at RFS is not an offer to revise and resubmit; it is closer to the editor offering you the option to work on your paper and submit it anew. The journal states plainly that your unconditional chance of publication on revision is not much better than a fresh submission, and that the paper proceeds only if you convince the editor and the assigned referee.
The catch: the assigned referee can change between rounds, and the new referee reads the field's standard, not the feedback that produced your R&R. So you cannot write only to the referee you already know. Write to the standard of the field.
The mechanics make your response a package, not a private exchange
You submit separate letters to the editor and to each referee, and the letters to the referees must be anonymous. Two more facts shape the timeline:
- An R&R resubmission still carries the submission fee ($400 for SFS members, $460 for nonmembers in high-income economies); only a conditional acceptance waives it.
- You have 18 months from the decision to resubmit before the paper is normally treated as new, though the editor can grant an extension.
What finance referees actually demand
Top finance journals advise referees to list at most three essential points, keep reports to two or three single-spaced pages, and never act as shadow co-authors. The practical reading: a referee's essential points are the ones that decide the paper. Your revision is judged on whether you moved those three, not on whether you answered every minor suggestion. For an empirical paper, the essential point is almost always identification, and a clean instrument, discontinuity, or natural experiment beats a wall of robustness tables every time.
Key Insight
A Review of Financial Studies R&R is permission to submit anew, not an acceptance. Write the revision to convince a referee you have never met that the identification is clean, because the assigned referee can change between rounds and the new one is reading the field's standard, not your old feedback.
What our Review of Financial Studies rebuttal reviews surface
In our pre-submission review work with Review of Financial Studies submissions, the R&R letters that stall in a third or fourth round share a small set of recurring weaknesses. These are the same patterns referees flag when they re-read a revision.
At a journal where the acceptance rate sits near 8 percent, each one is the difference between converging and a rejection on revision. Every weakness below maps to a named failure pattern and is testable against your own draft before you resubmit.
Answering an identification concern with robustness tables. The single most common and most expensive pattern in our Review of Financial Studies pre-submission reviews is a rebuttal that meets an endogeneity or identification comment with a longer table of robustness checks that never change the research design. A referee who flags reverse causality or an omitted variable is asking for a cleaner causal claim, not more controls.
Adding ten new specifications to the regression does not move the decision; adding the instrument, the discontinuity, or the natural experiment does. Across our Review of Financial Studies rebuttal reviews this mismatch between the referee's identification request and the author's robustness response is the strongest predictor of another round.
Conceding a point in the letter without changing the paper. A rebuttal that writes "we agree this is a limitation" and then changes nothing in the methods or the regression reads as a stall. In our pre-submission review work with Review of Financial Studies manuscripts, we routinely find a sample-window or control concern acknowledged in the response letter but absent from the revised tables, with no new table, page, or line to point to. Concede only when you also do the work, and cite the location.
Inconsistent answers across referees. Because the editor reads the editor letter and every per-referee letter together, a rebuttal that frames the same statistical analysis one way for Referee 1 and another way for Referee 2 reads as evasive. In our Review of Financial Studies pre-submission reviews we often see an endogeneity or sample size concern raised by two referees and answered with two different windows or two different instruments. Reconcile every overlapping comment to a single, consistent change before you resubmit.
A defensive tone to the editor. Because the editor decides whether you and the assigned referee can converge inside the two-or-three-round goal, a letter that argues the referee was wrong instead of doing the work damages you with the one reader who matters most.
In our Review of Financial Studies pre-submission reviews, the rebuttals we flag hardest are the ones that lecture the editor on why a concern is misguided, with missing reproducibility evidence and no acknowledgment of where the referee was right. The same letter, rewritten to concede cleanly and show the cleaner design, reads as the work of an author the editor can shepherd to acceptance.
Run the cleaner design, document the location, reconcile across referees, and write to the editor, not at the editor. That four-part discipline is what separates a Review of Financial Studies rebuttal that converges toward acceptance from one that stalls into a fourth round or a rejection on revision. Check your Review of Financial Studies point-by-point response for these patterns before you resubmit.
When to comply and when to push back
Situation | Recommended approach at the Review of Financial Studies |
|---|---|
Referee flags endogeneity or reverse causality | Comply. Change the design: instrument, discontinuity, or natural experiment. Robustness tables alone will not resolve it. |
Referee asks for a test that is genuinely out of scope | Push back with a reason, add an alternative analysis, and note the open question. Keep it to the essential points. |
Referee questions the identifying assumption | Comply. Defend the exclusion restriction explicitly or replace the design. This is the highest-leverage fix. |
Referee asks for economic magnitude | Comply. Add a one-standard-deviation interpretation and a benchmark; finance referees expect it. |
Two referees raise the same sample concern | Reconcile to one answer. Use the same window and the same instrument across both letters. |
Referee requests a framing or contribution change | Engage substantively. Reposition the contribution; the editor weighs novelty heavily on revision. |
Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of Review of Financial Studies-targeted resubmissions, 2025 cohort.
Readiness check
Run the scan to see how your manuscript scores on these criteria.
See score, top issues, and what to fix before you submit.
How much work a Review of Financial Studies rebuttal actually takes
Authors consistently underestimate the identification work and overestimate the writing. This breakdown is about workload, not the journal's decision clock; for the end-to-end schedule, see the Review of Financial Studies submission guide.
Rebuttal task | Where the effort goes | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
Reading and clustering referee reports | Finding the three essential points behind the comments | A day of careful reading, not a skim |
Rebuilding the identification strategy | The actual bar for an empirical revision | The bulk of the work, often months of new analysis |
Writing the per-referee replies | One reply plus a table, page, and line reference per comment | Less than authors fear once the new design exists |
Reconciling overlapping concerns | Same instrument and window for every referee who raised it | Skipped most often, and the editor sees it |
Preparing the replication trail | Code and data documented during the R&R, not at the end | A scramble later if you wait for conditional acceptance |
Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of Review of Financial Studies resubmissions, 2025 cohort, last updated June 7, 2026.
The replication package you should plan during the R&R, not after
The Review of Financial Studies verifies reproducibility before a paper publishes, so the smart authors build the trail while they revise. The code and data sharing policy effective for papers conditionally accepted on or after October 1, 2025 sets out a clear sequence:
- Deposit raw data, analysis data, transformation and analysis code, and a README following the template README in Social Sciences v1.1 in the RFS Dataverse, aligned to the Data and Code Availability Standard.
- RFS Data Editors configure a dedicated, secure virtual environment, confirm the code executes, and reproduce the key results.
- The Data Editors host their verification code and report in a public RFS GitHub repository.
Build the package while you revise
RFS Data Editors run your code in a secure environment and reproduce your key results before the paper publishes. If your R&R changes the identification strategy, your code and data change with it, so the cheapest time to document the trail is during the revision, not after conditional acceptance.
Why this belongs in your R&R, not your acceptance checklist
Do not treat replication as a conditional-acceptance chore. If your R&R changes the identification strategy, your code and data change with it. A clean, documented package built during the revision is what lets conditional acceptance move to publication without a stall.
Two practical moves close the loop. When non-public data prevents sharing, document the restriction in the README and provide a data schema or synthetic data so the Data Editors can still verify the code. And mention, in the editor letter, that your revised results rest on a replication package prepared to the current standard. To an editor reading near an 8 percent acceptance rate, that signals an author who finishes.
Honest friction: rejection on revision is real
A revise-and-resubmit at the Review of Financial Studies is not a soft acceptance. The journal is explicit that your unconditional chance of publication is not much better than a fresh submission, and with a 2025 acceptance rate of about 8 percent (and 6 percent in 2023 and 2024), rejection after revision is common.
The revised paper goes to the editor and the assigned referee, who can change between rounds, and it can still end in rejection if the new evidence does not move the core causal claim. Most rejections at this stage trace to two causes we see repeatedly: answering an identification concern with robustness tables that did not address the endogeneity, and conceding a point in the letter without changing the paper.
Think twice before you resubmit if any of these are true:
- The response uses generic "we have addressed this" language with no table, page, or line numbers.
- A referee asked for cleaner identification and you answered with more robustness checks.
- You agreed a point in the letter but the revised tables are unchanged.
- The same concern from two referees got two different answers.
- The letter argues the referee was wrong instead of doing the work.
Fixing these before resubmission is what keeps a second round from becoming a rejection, and what keeps you inside the 18-month resubmission window without burning a round.
Red flags a Review of Financial Studies referee spots in seconds
Before you resubmit, scan your own response for the patterns that draw an immediate re-review comment. Each is a specific, checkable thing in your draft, not a vague quality dimension.
- A reply with no location. Any "we have updated the analysis" with no table, page, and line number reads as evasion the moment a referee cannot find the change.
- Robustness where identification was requested. A referee flagged endogeneity and the reply adds specifications instead of changing the design. This is the single most common cause of another round.
- A concession with no change.
"We agree this is a limitation" followed by identical tables signals you wrote the letter but did not do the work.
- Two answers to one shared point. The same endogeneity or sample concern raised by two referees, answered two different ways, signals you did not reconcile the reports.
- A defensive opener to the editor.
"The referee misunderstands" at the top of a letter, read by the editor who controls the round, reads worse than any gap in the data.
How does this guide go beyond the Review of Financial Studies author guidelines?
The official guidelines tell you the procedure: submit separate anonymous letters to the editor and each referee, pay the resubmission fee, resubmit within 18 months. They stop there. What they do not tell you is the judgment that decides the paper:
- The R&R is permission to submit anew, not an offer of acceptance.
- The assigned referee can change and reads the field's standard, not your old feedback.
- Identification beats robustness for an empirical revision.
- The replication package is verified before publication and should be built during the R&R.
Those four facts change how you write every reply. The patterns above come from our pre-submission reviews of Review of Financial Studies rebuttals, and they are testable against your own draft today, not theoretical concerns.
- Manusights pre-submission reviews of Review of Financial Studies-targeted manuscripts (2025 cohort)
Frequently asked questions
It is closer to permission to submit your paper anew than to an offer of acceptance. The Review of Financial Studies states that your revision's unconditional chance of publication is not much better than a fresh submission, and that you must convince both the editor and the assigned referee on the merits. The assigned referee can change between rounds, and the new referee's view of acceptability may differ from the feedback you received. Treat the R&R as a serious empirical project, not a wording pass.
Write separate letters: one to the editor and one anonymous letter to each referee, unless the editor instructs otherwise. Open the editor letter with the major changes, then under each referee quote the comment in full, state the change, and give the table number, page, and line in the revised paper. Reconcile any identification or endogeneity concern raised by more than one referee to a single, consistent answer, because the editor reads all the letters together.
The journal's stated goal is a decision in two or three rounds, described as a goal and not a promise, and additional rounds happen. Full review with revisions commonly runs 12 to 24 months end to end. First-decision turnaround is fast by finance standards, a median of about 33 days in 2025, but the multi-round R&R culture means the long clock is the revision phase, not the initial decision.
Under the code and data sharing policy effective for papers conditionally accepted on or after October 1, 2025, authors deposit raw data, analysis data, transformation and analysis code, and a README following the template README in Social Sciences v1.1 in the RFS Dataverse. RFS Data Editors verify that the code executes in a dedicated secure virtual environment and reproduces the key results. Plan your code and data trail during the R&R, not at conditional acceptance.
Yes. A revise-and-resubmit is not an acceptance, and with a 2025 acceptance rate near 8 percent and 6 percent in 2023 and 2024, rejection after revision is common. The most frequent cause we see is answering an identification concern with more robustness tables that do not address endogeneity. If the new evidence does not move the editor and the assigned referee on the core causal claim, the paper can be rejected on revision.
Sources
- Submit a Paper, Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies (accessed June 2026)
- Review and Refund Policies, Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies (accessed June 2026)
- Code and Data Sharing Policy, Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies (accessed June 2026)
- RFS Statistics, Society for Financial Studies (accessed June 2026)
- Advice and Guidelines for Referees, Journal of Financial Economics (accessed June 2026)
- Ten simple rules for writing a response to reviewers, William Stafford Noble, PLOS Computational Biology (accessed June 2026)
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