Rof tables figures

Review of Finance Tables And Figures

Use this when exhibits are too dense, under-explained, or wasting the 60-page budget. At RoF exhibits are not free space: the hard 60-page cap explicitly counts appendices, bibliography, figures, and tables, so every exhibit must earn its place and be self-contained for a top-three-standard referee.

When to trigger

• The main table has too many columns and buries the headline result.
• Figures lack confidence bands, units, or self-contained notes.
• The manuscript is near or over 60 pages and exhibits are part of why.

Exhibit rules

• Lead with one clean headline exhibit a reader grasps in seconds; keep the main paper focused on exhibits that carry the finance contribution or address likely top-three-standard objections.
• Use table notes to document sample, period, variable construction, fixed effects, clustering, controls, units, and economic magnitude — a referee should read the exhibit without hunting through the text.
• Prefer figures where a relationship is visual: event-time cumulative returns, sorted portfolios, factor loadings. Show confidence bands; avoid chartjunk; use vector output (PDF/EPS).
• Move mechanical robustness grids to the supplementary replication package rather than padding in-paper exhibits, keeping the main identification logic self-contained.
• For theory papers, use figures to clarify comparative statics or equilibrium regions, not to decorate algebra; keep proofs compact so they do not eat the page budget.
• Respect the formatting baseline (at least 12-point font, at least 1.5 line spacing) and re-check that appendices, bibliography, figures, and tables still fit the 60-page cap.

Page-budget worked example

Illustrative. A corporate-finance draft carries 14 tables and 5 figures — roughly 19 exhibit pages, nearly a third of the 60-page ceiling before a word of prose. The RoF-shaped cut keeps in the body: summary statistics, the headline result, the identification exhibit (an event-study figure), one mechanism table, and one robustness table — five to seven exhibits. Everything else moves to the internet appendix behind one-sentence pointers ("Table IA.4 repeats column 3 under alternative winsorization"). The body lands near eight exhibit pages, leaving room for the argument the referees grade.

Exhibit calibration against the journal (hedged)

• Accepted general-interest finance papers tend toward six to ten body exhibits with a substantial internet appendix carrying the robustness battery; conventions differ by subfield, so sample recent RoF issues before fixing your own count.
• Supplementary material is hosted via OUP alongside the article and the replication package; confirm appendix naming and hosting mechanics against the journal's current author guidelines.

Referee objections to exhibits and the conforming fix

Objection	Fix that satisfies an RoF report
"Table 5 is uninterpretable"	split into panels; isolate the headline column; add the magnitude sentence to the note ("one s.d. of X moves Y by Z bp")
"The figure carries no inference"	add 95% bands and state the clustering level in the figure note
"Where is the robustness for claim 3?"	a visible internet-appendix pointer — robustness may leave the body but never the paper trail
"European and US samples are not comparable"	harmonization note: source per sample (Datastream vs. CRSP), screens applied, currency conversion, matching filters
"Exhibit numbers do not match the text"	regenerate all exhibits from the replication scripts (one numbered script per exhibit) before resubmitting

Execution bridge (StatsPAI / Stata MCP)

Generate exhibits from the fitted result, not by retyping numbers. Full map: execution-with-mcp. Review of Finance is the EFA flagship — corporate-causal chain for corporate papers, factor-zoo haircut for asset pricing.

• Tables: etable (multi-model) or did_summary_to_latex straight from the result_id.
• Figures: plot_from_result / enhanced_event_study_plot / event_study_table — axis units and the SE/clustering note baked in.
• Every note names the estimator + clustering and states the magnitude in interpretable units.

See a full fitted-result → exhibit chain in the JF execution walkthrough.

Anti-patterns

• A nine-column kitchen-sink table as the main result.
• Figures with no units, no bands, or notes that require the body text to interpret.
• Letting appendix tables and the bibliography silently push the paper past 60 pages.

Output format

[Exhibit status] keep / compress / move / delete
[Finance role] <main result, identification, mechanism, robustness, or theory>
[Missing note] <sample, variables, controls, SEs, units, or data source>
[Page-budget action] <specific cut or move>