For articles eventually published in the top twenty academic finance journals and top-tier academic business journals, I examine the acceptance time (the time from first-round submission to final-round acceptance) and online/print publication times (the time from first-round submission to online/print publication). I find that the median acceptance times of the top five general-interest finance journals are: Journal of Financial Economics (9.9 months), Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (10.6 months), Review of Finance (11.7 months), Review of Financial Studies (15.5 months), and Journal of Finance (19.8 months). The three fastest in finance are Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Review of Asset Pricing Studies, and Financial Management. Journal of Finance is one of the slowest top-tier business journals. Large and significant time differences support the editorial differences hypothesis. Received December 14, 2016; editorial decision December 22, 2016 by Editor Paolo Fulghieri.

Performance share plans are an increasingly important component of executive compensation. They are equity-based, long-term incentive plans where the number of shares to be awarded is a quasi-linear function of a performance result over a fixed time period. We derive closed-form formulas for the value of a performance share plan when the performance measure is: (1) a non-traded measure following an Arithmetic Brownian Motion (e.g., earnings per share), (2) a non-traded measure following a Geometric Brownian Motion (e.g., revenue), or (3) a rank-order tournament of traded asset returns that are following Arithmetic Brownian Motions (e.g., percentile of ranked stock returns). Then we empirically test our valuation formulas. We find that our valuation formulas are more accurate for performance share plans based on earnings per share when forecasting using analyst consensus prior to the grant date. We also find that the efficiency of our valuation model greatly depends on the method used to forecast future firm performance. The policy implication is that FASB should consider requiring that grant date fair value be estimated using valuation formulas such as ours.