Critical Finance Review
Editor's Page

The CFR seeks top finance papers, just like the JF, JFE, RFS, and JFQA. It differs in that it prefers more controversial, unusual, and critical papers. It can take chances. The types of paper that maximize the distance between the CFR and the other journals are

  • papers that point out that previous papers and/or literatures are wrong;
  • papers that are considered correct but obvious by half of the profession and obviously incorrect by the other half;
  • papers that upset half the profession.
Due to its goals, the CFR is somewhat different. First, its focus is relatively more tilted towards empirical papers. Second, it is not difficult to write a straightforward paper that has a good chance to be accepted into the CFR. The CFR would welcome good and competent critiques of papers from this document, for example. Third, the CFR provides quick presubmission editorial feedback regarding interest in a manuscript. For more information refer to authors/.

The hand-collected per-paper citation rankings of the CFR are near the top-3 now, but they are not the correct metric for the CFR. About half of the papers in the CFR critique other work. Some of these papers are influential not because they grow literatures, but because they reduce them. This means their impact is not well measured by future cites. (If anything, it should be measured by their impact in reducing cites, including to themselves.) A better metric for the CFR influence in the profession are the number of papers assigned in PhD class reading lists. For papers published in the last 5 years, casual observation suggests that the CFR dominates the top-3 journals per paper already.

Overall, papers published in the CFR have visibility roughly on par with the top 3.

Clarification:: The CFR is peer-reviewed, just like any other good academic journal. It is not an editorial journal. The CFR is a peer-reviewed and refereed journal—in the same sense that Nature and Science are. Referees help improve and assess papers. Yet, comparing the CFR to other top finance journals, the editorial decision of whether a submission is interesting is made relatively more often by the editor and less often by the referee. All finance journals do this; the CFR just does it a little more.

Request for Proposals: The CFR will now accept proposals for a special issue on Volatility and Higher Moments (Replication-Plus)

Great News: Elsevier's scientific citation site SCOPUS has accepted the CFR into its set of journals. Thomson's Web of Science has now created an "Emerging Sciences Citation Index," which makes citation tracking easy, too. (The CFR is also covered in Cabell's International, EconLit/JEL, Electronic Journals Library, Google Scholar, INSPEC,and RePEc/IDEAS.)

Thanks for the shoutout: https://www.proprietarydataanalytics.com/ and the Boston Arch Diocese.

2012, Vol 1

2013, Vol 2

2014, Vol 3

2015, Vol 4

2016, Vol 5-1

2016, Vol 5-2

2017, Vol 6-1

2017, Vol 6-2

Forthcoming Papers

2018 and Beyond --- Cite as Volume 7+ for now

Liquidity: Replications, Extensions, and Critique (2018, Vol 8-?)

The CFR has invited replications of the three most influential liquidity papers of the last 20 years (RFP Liquidity call). The papers and lead authors will be

Please do not consider these papers definitive until we have collected them and offered the original authors a chance to respond. Chase Deehan has agreed to publish documented replicating R code.

Future Replication Possibilities (incl. currently influential paper reference)

This website is also available in encrypted https://cfr.ivo-welch.info form in case you are paranoid.