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rfs-writing-style

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Use as a late-stage polish when prose, contribution framing, or the abstract/introduction is the bottleneck for a The Review of Financial Studies (RFS) manuscript. Sharpens exposition; does NOT change the empirics, identification, or results.

Review-of-Financial-Studies-Skills/skills/rfs-writing-style/SKILL.md

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# Writing & Contribution Framing (rfs-writing-style)

## When to trigger

- The abstract or introduction buries what is new
- Prose is dense, over-hedged, or jargon-heavy
- The contribution is implied but never stated as a crisp claim
- The paper is technically done and needs a final exposition pass

> Run this only after identification, robustness, and exhibits hold up. Do not polish prose around an unsettled result.

## How RFS papers read

The best RFS papers make the **new question and the answer legible in the first two pages**. An RFS Editor desk-screens before referees, so the contribution must land before page three or risk a desk reject. RFS welcomes theory + empirics, so the prose must integrate them, not present a model and then an unrelated regression — Brunnermeier and Pedersen (2009, RFS 22(6)) is a model of a tight theory→prediction→evidence arc. Two hard RFS house-style rules bind the writing: the **abstract must be ≤ 100 words** (RFS returns longer abstracts), and references follow **Chicago Manual of Style author-date** format. A long, literature-first abstract is both off-house-style and over the word limit.
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