Pandoc cross-ref: adding empty line after last section title

Question

I need to write articles and switch from latex to pandoc (better: I intend to do so). My markdown file looks like this:

....
bla bla 

\noindent
\setlength{\parindent}{-0.2in}
\setlength{\leftskip}{0.2in}
\setlength{\parskip}{8pt}

# References

Mind, References really is the last line of the file.

I compile like this:

pandoc ../../bibliography/default.yaml  -f markdown-tex_math_dollars -s --bibliography ../../bibliography/bibliography.bib --csl ../../bibliography/harvard-cite-them-right.csl -F pandoc-crossref $f -o $f.pdf

My default yaml file:

---
geometry: a4paper,verbose,tmargin=2.5cm,bmargin=2.5cm,lmargin=1.5cm,rmargin=1.5cm
inputenc: latin9
indent: true
sectionsDepth: 3
link-citations: true
numberSections: true
linestretch: 1.5
header-includes:
    - \renewcommand{\familydefault}{\rmdefault}
    - \usepackage{lineno}
    - \linenumbers
---

And what I get in PDF is this:

As you can see, there's an empty line after References.

Q:

1. How can I get rid of this empty line?
2. How can I remove the numbering from section title References only, leaving the remaining section titles numbered?

Thanks