Law School Faculty Who Publish in Top Finance Journals

Legal academia is full of brilliant scholars doing important work. But a small group of law professors have done something rather unusual: getting past the notoriously demanding referees at the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies—the most selective peer-reviewed finance journals in the world.

These three journals sit at the pinnacle of financial economics. They reject roughly 94% of submissions. The review process is grueling, often requiring multiple rounds of revision over several years. Success requires not just a good idea, but the technical chops to execute rigorous empirical or theoretical work that satisfies finance PhDs who’ve spent their careers in a mathematically demanding field—one that has produced Nobel laureates such as Eugene Fama, Robert Shiller, and Robert Merton.

For law professors—who typically face different training, different incentive structures, and different scholarly conversations—breaking through is a genuine accomplishment. It represents a bridge between two disciplines that don’t always speak the same language.

The first law professor to publish in a top-3 finance journal appears to be Harvard’s Mark Roe, who published seminal work on corporate ownership in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1990. The most published is Lucian Bebchuk (also at Harvard), with ten publications across these journals. But faculty at a growing number of institutions have shown they can compete at the same level—Berkeley, Columbia, Virginia, NYU, Northwestern, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, and others have all placed work in these journals.

Only around 40 law professors have ever published in these journals, out of roughly 1,000 tenured or tenure-track professors teaching business law subjects at AALS law schools.

Perhaps most noteworthy is the success of faculty at institutions with smaller communities of corporate legal scholars focused on empirical finance. Faculty at USC, Michigan, Georgetown, and Georgia have all placed work in top-three finance journals—a testament to individual scholars who have cultivated the technical skills and intellectual persistence to compete at the highest levels of financial economics.

I’m pleased to share that my paper “The Cost of Regulatory Compliance in the United States” (with Trebbi and Zhang) has been accepted for publication in the Review of Financial Studies. The paper develops a novel methodology for measuring regulatory compliance costs using firms’ labor and capital responses, finding that these costs fall disproportionately on mid-sized firms.  (This work has been cited by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee).  With Ryan Bubb joining USC Gould in July 2026, our school will have two faculty members with top-3 finance publications.

The path to publication in these journals is never easy. But the growing geographic and institutional diversity of those who have succeeded suggests that the opportunity exists for highly motivated scholars at a wide range of institutions.

Summary: Law Schools with Faculty Publishing in Top-3 Finance Journals

By Research Area

Faculty members are sorted based on their overall body of work, including papers published in other venues.

Corporate Governance & Shareholder Activism

Bankruptcy & Corporate Finance

M&A & Contracts

Securities Regulation & Market Structure

Banking & Financial Regulation

Venture Capital & Startups

Investment Funds & Shareholder Voting

Empirical Methods

Taxes, Crime, and Political Economy

Retail Investors & Financial Advice

Legend: Faculty = number of faculty with top-3 publications; Pubs (Raw) = total publications counting co-authored papers fully; Pubs (Adj.) = adjusted for co-authorship among law professors; JF = Journal of Finance; JFE = Journal of Financial Economics; RFS = Review of Financial Studies