• If you received a letter inviting you or allowing you to resubmit the paper, you should decide whether you want to follow that course of action. Typically, you will have received an editorial letter telling you the conditions under which you can resubmit the paper. Usually, that letter will require you to "incorporate the comments of the referee" and perhaps make additional suggestions. Incorporating the comments of the referee means just that: You take the list of comments one at a time and take them into account in your revision. Sometimes you will have very good reasons not to incorporate a specific comment. When you resubmit, you should include a response to the referee where you explain how you took the comments into account and why. In your letter of resubmission, you should tell the editor how you took into account his comments. In revising a paper, it is best to limit changes to what is required in the editorial letter. Making dramatic changes in a paper that are asked for neither by the referee nor the editor is a recipe for frustration unless these changes are necessary to correct mistakes or to incorporate recent contributions to the field.
  
• Sometimes the referee and/or editor provides feedback about a general problem with your paper (e.g., it is verbose). In such cases you should work to respond to that criticism throughout the paper, not just in the specific instances or examples that are mentioned in the referee's report or the editor's letter.

4. What is the role of the Advisory and Associate Editors?

• They are active referees who typically consider between 3 and 8 papers a year. In addition, they are trusted advisors for the Managing Editor.

5. Does it help to have my dissertation advisor lobby the editor?

• No. Papers get published because they contribute to our field irrespective of the parentage or connections of their authors. Authors who published in the Journal come from everywhere - private universities, public universities, colleges, federal government, Wall Street, foreign universities, foreign governments. The Journal strives to be open and accessible to all those who have a good paper.

6. Why is the Journal biased towards authors from the U.S.?

• It is not. Papers from foreign authors are published all the time. The key to success for foreign authors is to make sure that their paper is written clearly in grammatically correct language. It is not enough that a paper is correct for it to be published. It has to make a significant contribution that can be understood by our readers. If an author has trouble writing a paper this way, a simple solution is often to make a small investment in hiring a text editor who can polish the author's manuscript and improve its chances of publication by making it clearer.

• Papers using foreign data are welcome. However, authors using such data should write papers that contribute to the field beyond replicating U.S. studies on a foreign dataset. Authors should ask themselves: What is it that we learn from this dataset about the way financial markets or corporations operate in general?

7. How long does it take for a paper to be published from first submission to publication?

• It varies widely. The best way to accelerate the process is to revise a paper quickly and be responsive to advice given by the editor and the referee. Typically, an accepted paper will have undergone two or three revisions.

8. I resubmitted my paper and received a report from a different referee. What is going on?

• The original referee may be incapacitated (for instance, he died or became a Dean).

• The editor wants the opinion of a referee with different knowledge from the first referee to make the paper converge faster. For instance, the first referee might have been a theorist and now the editor wants advice from an empiricist.

9. How can I affect the choice of a referee?

• Every effort is made to assign to each paper the most appropriate referee. Authors can help the editor who assigns a referee by having an abstract, an introduction and a conclusion that are clear, precise, and reflect the contribution of the paper accurately. Strategic referencing is almost always unproductive: Omitting an author from the references hoping that, as a result, the editor will not think of asking him or her to referee the paper is generally noticed by the editor.

• Typically, the first referee asked to offer advice on a paper will respond with a referee's report. However, referees are busy and successful colleagues. If, when reading the paper, they find it difficult or impossible to understand because of poor and careless exposition, they may choose to return the paper without a report. In these cases, the author will have to wait longer for an editorial decision. Good exposition makes it more likely that the author will receive a quick editorial decision and that the referee and/or the editor will not misunderstand the paper.

10. Does the Journal consider for publication papers previously made available as working papers on the internet?

• Yes. Making working papers available on the internet does not constitute publication for the purpose of submissions. Papers can be posted on the internet until the authors receive a final acceptance letter from the Journal .

11. My paper has been accepted for publication at the Journal and I would like to keep making it available on the internet. What can I do?

• There are no restrictions on making abstracts of your accepted and/or published papers available on the internet. Accepted papers not yet published in the Journal are available on the internet through ScienceDirect.

12. I worry that my paper is highly theoretical. How do I know whether it is appropriate for the Journal of Financial Economics?

• No paper is too theoretical for the Journal of Financial Economics . Whether a paper is acceptable depends on its contribution to our understanding of finance relative to the cost of reading it.