jfqa-writing-style

JFQA Writing Style (jfqa-writing-style)

Use this skill to bring a JFQA draft up to house style. JFQA is a quantitative finance journal; the prose should be precise, economical, and result-forward.

Voice and structure

• Write for a finance audience — assume fluency in asset pricing and corporate finance, but state the economic intuition behind every result.
• Lead each section with its point; report economic magnitudes in plain finance units (bps, monthly alpha, percentage of a SD).
• Avoid over-claiming: conclusions must not exceed what the design supports.
• Keep the paper from drifting over-long — JFQA discourages excessive length and may desk-reject it.

The abstract and formatting (JFQA-specific, enforced)

• Abstract: one paragraph, no more than 100 words (see jfqa-contribution-framing). This is a hard cap; trim ruthlessly.
• Layout: 8.5 × 11 paper, 1-inch margins, 12-pt Times New Roman, double-spaced body and appendices.
• Submit a single text-searchable PDF (not image-only).
• Anonymize for double-anonymous review: remove author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, and identifying self-references; scrub PDF metadata.
• No specific named citation style (APA/Chicago) is mandated at initial submission (待核实); accepted papers follow the JFQA "Style Guide for Accepted and Conditionally Accepted Papers." Keep references internally consistent now.

Anti-patterns

• An abstract over 100 words or in multiple paragraphs.
• Single-spacing, non-TNR fonts, or wrong margins (formatting strikes).
• Author identity left in the text or PDF metadata under double-anonymous review.
• Significance language with no economic magnitude.

Sentence-level repair rules

• Replace "is associated with" with the design language the paper can defend: predicts, prices, shifts, identifies, bounds, or correlates.
• Attach a finance unit to every main result: basis points, abnormal return, spread, leverage ratio, turnover, default probability, or dollar value.
• Put the sample and design before the headline number when selection is the likely referee attack.
• Cut any sentence that would still be true in a generic economics journal; JFQA prose should sound like finance, not a methods placeholder.

Before/after rewrites from a hypothetical corporate-finance draft (numbers illustrative)

Before	After (JFQA register)
"Leverage is significantly associated with investment."	"A one-SD increase in book leverage predicts a 1.4 pp lower investment rate, 11% of its mean."
"We find strong evidence consistent with our hypothesis."	"Spreads widen 18 bps in the quarter the covenant binds, and only for firms near the threshold — the pattern the collateral channel predicts."
"Results are robust to a battery of checks."	"The estimate moves between 1.2 and 1.6 pp across alternative samples, definitions, and clustering (Table IA.2)."
"This paper contributes to several literatures."	"We revise the documented buyback effect downward by half once institutional crowding is measured."

The pattern in every rewrite: a finance unit, a scaling benchmark, and a checkable location replace adjectives.

Length and section calibration for a JFQA draft

• Introduction: typically four to six double-spaced pages carrying the question, the answer with numbers, the design preview, and the rival contrast — there is no codified rule, so calibrate to recent JFQA issues and confirm against the journal's current author guidelines before relying on any limit.
• Data and variable construction come before results, with the sample-construction detail that lets a referee reconstruct the filters.
• Robustness that repeats the main table's message belongs in an Internet Appendix; remember the journal's stated impatience with over-long manuscripts.

Consistency sweep before the PDF freezes

• One name per variable everywhere — text, equations, table headers, and the archive read-me; "BLEV," "book leverage," and "leverage ratio" must not coexist.
• Numbers quoted in prose must match the exhibits to the digit; regenerate prose numbers from the master script output rather than retyping them.
• Verb tense discipline: results in the present tense, sample construction in the past, uniformly.
• Re-run the anonymization pass after the consistency sweep, since late edits are where acknowledgments and identifying phrases sneak back in.

Output format

【Prose】result-forward, magnitudes in finance units? [Y/N]
【Abstract】≤100 words, one paragraph? [Y/N]
【Formatting】8.5x11 / 1-in / 12-pt TNR / double-spaced / searchable PDF? [Y/N]
【Anonymized】body + metadata clean? [Y/N]
【Next step】jfqa-replication-and-data-policy