brycewang-stanford Literature Positioning (jfe-literature-positioning)
When to trigger
- The literature section is a chronological list of "X did A; Y did B"
- A referee could plausibly say "this is already in JF/RFS/JFE paper Z"
- You cannot state in two sentences how you differ from the closest paper
- You are unsure which strands (corporate finance, asset pricing, theory) you must engage
How JFE referees read positioning
JFE referees are domain experts who know the frontier. They are unforgiving about two things: (1) failing to cite and engage the closest prior work, especially recent top-3 finance papers, and (2) overclaiming novelty against work you simply did not read. Positioning is an argument, not a bibliography.
Know the JFE canon you are extending or revising, and attribute it correctly: Jensen & Meckling (1976) and Fama & French (1993, 2015) are JFE; Banz (1981) size effect is JFE; but Carhart (1997) momentum-persistence is Journal of Finance, not JFE. Miscrediting a foundational paper signals you do not know the literature. JFE's editorial structure is small and field-specialized — Editor-in-Chief Toni M. Whited (Michigan) with co-editors spanning corporate finance and asset pricing (Kellogg, Wharton, NYU Stern) — so your handling editor will likely be a frontier expert in exactly your subfield. Verify self-citation/anonymity rules on jfinec.com.
Build the positioning argument
1. Map the conversation, not the timeline
Group prior work into the 2–4 debates your paper enters (e.g., "the channel debate," "the measurement debate," "the identification debate"). Each strand gets a short synthesis, not a paper-by-paper recap.
2. Locate the closest papers precisely
For the 3–5 nearest papers, state in one line each: what they establish and where they stop. Your contribution lives in the gap between "where they stop" and "what you show."
3. Make the differentiation concrete
For each closest paper, name the concrete difference: new identifying variation, new data, a mechanism they could not test, a correction to a believed result, or external validity they lacked. Avoid vague "we extend" / "we complement."
4. Engage the theory you test or motivate
Even an empirical JFE paper should connect to the financial-economics theory it tests or is motivated by. State which prediction you are taking to the data and whose theory generates it.
5. Pre-empt the "already known" objection
Write the sentence a skeptical referee would write ("Isn't this just paper Z in a new sample?") and answer it directly in the text.
Checklist
- Related work is organized by debate/strand, not by date
- The closest 3–5 papers are named with "what they show / where they stop"
- Each differentiation is concrete (variation / data / mechanism / correction)
- The theory being tested or motivated is cited explicitly
- Recent top-3 finance work on the topic is engaged, not just older classics
- The "isn't this already known?" objection is answered in the text
- Self-citations comply with the journal's anonymity rules
Anti-patterns
- A literature "dump" that cites broadly but engages nothing closely
- Citing only older canonical papers while ignoring recent JF/JFE/RFS work on the exact question
- "To the best of our knowledge, we are the first" with no defense
- Overclaiming relative to a paper you misread or did not read
- Burying the contribution sentence three paragraphs into the related work
Output format
【Strands】[debate 1, debate 2, ...]
【Closest papers】for each: what-they-show / where-they-stop / your-difference
【Theory engaged】whose prediction you test or are motivated by
【Pre-empted objection】"isn't this already known?" -> answer
【Gaps remaining】[...]
【Next】jfe-identification