Report of the Editor of The Journal of Finance for the Year 2020

• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Author: STEFAN NAGEL
• Date: 01 April 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.13015

THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE •VOL. LXXVI, NO. 2 •APRIL 2021

Report of the Editor of The Journal of Finance

for the Year 2020

STEFAN NAGEL, EDITOR

The year 2020 was an extraordinary year at the Journal. The ongoing COVID-

19 pandemic caused hardships for many individuals in our profession, includ-

ing authors, referees, and members of the Journal’s team. My co-Editors and

I are deeply grateful that so many individuals still managed to contribute

time and effort to help keep the Journal running despite these diff‌icult cir-

cumstances.

The pandemic also brought an avalanche of new research investigating the

economic impact of COVID-19. To provide a forum for discussion of this re-

search and to allow the Editors and Associate Editors of the Journal to get an

overview of work in this rapidly developing area, we organized a virtual con-

ference on the f‌inancial consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, jointly with

the Fama-Miller Center at the University of Chicago. We received 140 paper

submissions and we selected 10 of these for presentation in f‌ive zoom sessions

from October 12 to 16, 2020.

Submissions to the Journal reached an all-time high in 2020. Table Idetails

the number and timing of submissions received throughout the year. We re-

ceived 1,331 submissions, of which 1,204 were new manuscripts and 127 were

resubmissions. The number of new submissions rose by about 10% compared

with 2019, when it was 1,083.

Turnaround improved a little relative to previous years. As can be seen in

Table II, in 2020 67.9% of editorial decisions took less than 70 days. The me-

dian turnaround time in 2020 of 50 days is slightly higher than in 2019 (48

days), but the share of decisions that took over 100 days is lower than in the

previous year (8.8% vs. 9.4%). Figure 1compares turnaround over the 2016 to

2020 period.

In cases where we cannot see a reasonable chance that a submitted paper

could eventually clear the bar for publication in the Journal, we aim to spare

authors a lengthy review process with predictable negative outcome. For this

reason, we desk-reject about a third of new submissions. In 2019, the desk

rejection rate of 30% was somewhat lower than the previous year (34%). That

the desk rejection rate fell despite a substantial rise in the number of new

submissions ref‌lects the generally high quality of the submissions we received

in 2020.

Table III provides information on editorial decisions. Focusing on initial sub-

missions, the probability of an Editor asking for a revision or granting accep-

tance stayed virtually constant at 7.3%. While this number f‌luctuates from

DOI: 10.1111/jof‌i.13015

© 2021 the American Finance Association

1019