jfi-writing-style - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: jfi-writing-style description: Use when revising a Journal of Financial Intermediation (JFI) manuscript for the journal's house conventions — numbered sections, author–date Elsevier referencing, a concise stand-alone abstract, specialist intermediation vocabulary, and prose that explains the mechanism before the specifications. It edits for style; it does not invent content.

Writing Style (jfi-writing-style)

When to trigger

Polishing a JFI draft before submission or revision
Aligning references, sections, and abstract with JFI/Elsevier conventions

JFI house conventions (verified 2026-06-20; re-confirm on the official page)

Numbered sections (1, 1.1, 1.1.1) structure the manuscript.
References: "your-paper-your-way" at submission — any internally consistent style is accepted; the journal applies an author–date (name–year) Elsevier style at proof. In-text citations give surname(s) and year, with "et al." for three or more authors; the list is alphabetical then chronological, with a/b/c disambiguation for same-author/same-year items. Keep author–year fields clean.
Abstract: concise, factual, and able to stand alone, with references avoided; keep it at 250 words or fewer.
Keywords: provide 1-7 English keywords for indexing.
Optional Highlights: 3–5 bullets, max 85 characters each, strongly encouraged.
Generative-AI disclosure: if AI writing tools were used, declare them in a dedicated section before the References (see jfi-submission).

Make the mechanism land

JFI is read by intermediation specialists who reward a clearly motivated economic mechanism:

Explain the intermediary friction and channel before the econometric specification or the formal model — the reader should know why before how.
Tie every result back to the intermediation contribution (see jfi-contribution-framing); avoid coefficient-by-coefficient narration with no economic interpretation.
Define institutional terms on first use; precision about banks, loans, and regulation signals fluency.

Mechanism-first rewrite, worked (illustrative)

Before: "We regress loan growth on the capital shortfall interacted with bank size, controlling for firm fixed effects. The coefficient is −2.1 and significant at the 1% level."
After: "Banks that must rebuild capital face a choice between costly equity and shrinking assets. If lending relationships embody information rivals cannot replicate, constrained banks can cut relationship credit without losing the borrower — so recapitalization's burden falls on locked-in firms. Consistent with this, a 1pp shortfall reduces credit to the same firm by 2.1pp, and twice that for single-bank borrowers."
The rewrite names friction → channel → prediction before the number, which is how this journal's specialist readership parses a result; the regression mechanics move to the design section.

An intermediation lexicon check

Loose vocabulary signals a non-specialist to a single-blind referee who knows your name:

liquidity creation (the Diamond–Dybvig transformation function) vs. liquidity provision (supplying funds) — not interchangeable;
capital requirement (the rule) vs. capital ratio (the outcome) vs. capital shock (the change you exploit);
say credit supply only after demand is absorbed — until then it is "lending growth";
relationship lending implies repeated interaction and private information, not merely an existing loan;
a run is strategic withdrawal, not any deposit outflow;
shadow bank denotes intermediation outside the regulated perimeter, not any nonbank financial firm.

Style pushbacks at this venue, and fixes

"The introduction is a results list" → restructure as friction, mechanism, design, finding, lesson.
"Notation drifts between model and empirics" → one symbol table; the model's friction parameter should be the object the regression coefficient estimates or proxies.
"Reads like a policy report" → replace recommendation language with the equilibrium or identified margin the analysis actually delivers.
"The abstract could describe ten papers" → one abstract sentence each for friction, design or model, headline magnitude or proposition, and the intermediation lesson; cut everything else.

Anti-patterns

A numbered/footnote citation style left in at submission with no internal consistency
An abstract stuffed with references or with no stated finding
Specifications introduced before the mechanism is explained
Forgetting the AI-disclosure section when such tools were used

Output format

【Sections】numbered (1, 1.1)? [Y/N]
【References】internally consistent, author–year-ready? [Y/N]
【Abstract】concise, stand-alone, no refs, <=250 words? [Y/N]
【Mechanism-first】explained before specs? [Y/N]
【AI disclosure】present-if-used? [Y/N]
【Next skill】jfi-replication-and-data-policy