finman-rebuttal

• SKILL.mdcore · 7,650 bytes

# Rebuttal & Response Letter (finman-rebuttal)

## When to trigger

- An FM **R&R** or **conditional acceptance** decision letter has arrived
- You need to triage referee comments into must-do / argue / defer
- You are drafting the response-to-referees document and the revision plan
- A reject-with-encouragement note needs a strategy before any re-engagement

## How to read an FM decision

The editor's letter is the **priority signal**: it tells you which referee concerns are binding and which are optional. Given FM's criteria, the binding asks usually concern **credibility (identification/inference)** and **whether the contribution is interesting and general enough**, rather than robustness volume — FM **under-weights trivial robustness**, so an R&R rarely turns on "run ten more checks." Address the editor's stated priorities first and in full; treat the referee reports as the menu the editor has already filtered. Because FM values papers "people actually read," a revision that also **sharpens the framing and the so-what** — not just the econometrics — reads as responsive to the journal's taste. A revision is judged on whether the binding concerns are genuinely resolved and the paper is now more interesting, not on the number of new tables.

## Response-letter structure