LaTeX commands to meet journal style requirements

Included below are links to pages with the LaTeX commands that you need to satisfy the style requirements for publishing in various journals (AER, JF, JFQA, and RFS). These commands will help you satisfy the requests of the copyeditor; the objective here is not to produce a file that looks like a published paper in one of these journals.

Please note that these are not official instructions from the journals, but only what I have learnt through my own experience.

Each command below is preceded by an explanation of what the command does; these explanations are on lines that have as their first character the “%” sign, which tells LaTeX to treat the line as a comment rather than code to be executed.

The easiest thing to do is to cut-and-paste these commands into the preamble of your LaTeX text file — starting with the very top line. After you do this, the only thing you need to check is that you are not calling again (in your own LaTeX code) any of the packages that are already being called in the text below, and that you are not doing something inadvertently to undo the changes made by the code below.

Please let me know if there are any errors or that you think some instructions are missing and should be added to these lists of commands. (But, please do not write to me with general questions about LaTeX — instead, search on the internet, where there are real experts whose advice can resolve your problems.)