Last week I put out a plea on my YouTube channel for viewers to leak me documents. I will reiterate that plea: if you have any evidence of fraud, corruption, scandals, or any interesting stories, reach out via encrypted email:
chrisbrunet@protonmail.com
Please never email me from your employer’s device or network, and if you require more confidentiality, ask for my Signal.
When I put out that plea, I got a few responses.
This was one of the most interesting documents I received: a preserved copy of confidential referee records that was briefly posted and then promptly scrubbed from the internet:
The person who sent it to me was anonymous, but the original provenance is Dr. Bill Schwert, a professor at the University of Rochester who served as Managing Editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, one of the top 3 finance journals in the world, from 1996 through 2021—about 25 years. Through that tenure, he became arguably the single most powerful gatekeeper in academic finance, wielding enormous influence over which research was published, which ideas gained legitimacy, and which scholars’ careers advanced.
When he retired from the profession, he dropped this bombshell list of all 1,941 referees for the JFE from 1994-2020, the number of acceptances, rejections and the total reports they wrote, the acceptance rate, and the average turnaround time in days.
He named each referee by name.
This is remarkable data, and caused an enormous uproar because the referees were furious that their recommendation records had been made public.
The confidential data remained available on SSRN for just 22 days before the paper was quietly revised and the entire section was removed. But I have the original version, and now you have it too, because someone downloaded and preserved it during that short window it was online.
After he posted it, the team of editors replacing him at the JFE put out a statement denouncing the breach of confidential information, writing:
The editors of the JF, RFS, and the incoming editor of the JFE hereby affirm our commitment to never publicly disclose data that could reveal individual referees’ confidential recommendations, or any other confidential information about the editorial process.
The editors of the JF, RFS, and the incoming editor of the JFE further believe that editors are bound by the AFA Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics, sections 6.(d)(5) and 6.(f), as well as the rules for human subjects research, to not publicly disclose such confidential information
Of course, if you are retiring, the “AFA Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics” is completely toothless: it has no power over you whatsoever, and there are no meaningful repercussions for violating it. So, hilariously, Schwert could burn it all down and expose decades of other people’s confidential referee records on his way out the door, while the profession he had dominated for 25 years was left with little recourse beyond issuing an indignant statement and quietly deleting the evidence.
Schwert’s motivations remain unknown.
To read the breakdown of the data, including the 8 most hostile reviewers in finance (and my exchange with the professor who went 0-for-61), upgrade to a paid subscription.
Basic Findings
