Topic Selection (rof-topic-selection)

When to trigger

• The question feels incremental or sub-field-only ("yet another anomaly")
• You are unsure whether RoF (vs. a specialist field journal) is the right home
• You have data or a model but no first-order finance question yet
• You want to gauge fit before paying the submission fee

The RoF bar

RoF publishes general-interest finance at the level of the top-three finance journals, as the official journal of the European Finance Association (EFA). Its referees are explicitly asked to apply top-three-finance-journal standards, so the screening question is "would this interest the broad finance audience and survive a top-three referee?" RoF is genuinely both empirical and theoretical — asset pricing, corporate finance, banking, household finance, microstructure on the empirical side; asset-pricing theory, security/contract design, microstructure theory on the theory side. A clean theoretical result with a sharp economic message fits as well as a credible empirical finding.

Fit tests

1. First-order question — does the answer change how finance researchers think, not just add a decimal to a known coefficient?
2. Generality — is the lesson portable beyond one market, one country-year, one dataset?
3. Standard — could a top-three-finance referee call this publishable there? RoF aims for that quality.
4. Empirical vs. theory clarity — an empirical paper needs credible identification (→ rof-identification-strategy); a theory paper needs clean assumptions, a non-obvious result, and economic interpretation.
5. Process fit — RoF charges a real fee (EUR 350; EUR 300 for EFA members) and runs a two-round process; a paper needing five rounds to become interesting is a poor fit.

Two-candidate worked screen

Illustrative. Candidate A: "Do Italian cooperative banks lend differently?" — single-country, descriptive; fails the generality test unless rebuilt around what cooperative ownership reveals about lending under soft information everywhere, with a cross-country counterpart. As posed, it is a field-journal paper. Candidate B: "Does deposit-insurance design change bank risk-taking? Evidence from staggered EU coverage harmonization" — institution-driven variation across many countries, a first-order question with both an empirical and a theoretical audience inside RoF's scope. Verdict: B clears the bar as-is; A needs the reframe before the fee is worth paying.

Where RoF-fit questions come from

• Institutional variation Europe generates naturally: directive transpositions staggered across member states, ECB policy innovations, national supervisory experiments — shock designs a US-only dataset cannot offer, aimed at universal forces.
• Frontier areas the EFA community is actively building: sustainable and climate finance, fintech and digital payments, household finance — still subject to the general-interest framing test, not exempt from it.
• The EFA annual-meeting program as a barometer: sessions dense with top-three authors mark where the standard is currently being set and where the closest competitors are.

Pre-fee screening questions

• Would the paper stay interesting if the headline coefficient halved? Interest that survives magnitude risk is the safer bet at a two-round journal.
• Can you state the lesson without naming the country or the dataset? If not, generality is missing.
• Is there both a theory reader and an empirical reader who care? RoF's scope is genuinely both, and the broadest papers speak to each.
• Is the natural experiment yours alone for long? If competitors loom, the Fast-Track calculus enters early (→ rof-submission).

Anti-patterns

• A within-subfield estimate with no broad finance lesson — reads as a field-journal paper.
• A theory model with a foregone-conclusion result dressed in heavy notation.
• "First to study X in country Y" novelty with no first-order stake.
• Choosing RoF to dodge fees elsewhere — fit, not cost, should drive the choice.

Output format

【Question】one sentence, plain language
【Type】empirical / theoretical / both
【First-order?】[Y/N] — why
【Top-three-standard?】[Y/N]
【General lesson】beyond this setting: ...
【Verdict】RoF-fit / redirect / reframe
【Next step】rof-contribution-framing