Professor McCartney is an Assistant Professor of Commerce and the George A. Overstreet Jr. Distinguished Fellow in Real Estate at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. He also serves as the Director of Research at the Household and Urban Finance Lab at UVA.
His research investigates how social interactions, civic engagement, and politics connect household finance, real estate, and urban economics. His work has been published in leading economics and finance journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Urban Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies, and appeared in a number of prominent media outlets, including the New York Times.
It’s not too soon to wonder whether he’s on to something.
Political identity and partisanship are salient features of today's society. Using deeds records and voter rolls, we show that current residents are more likely to sell their homes when opposite-party neighbors move in nearby than when unaffiliated or same-party neighbors do. This is especially true when the new neighbors are politically active, consistent with an animosity between parties mechanism. We conclude that affective polarization is not limited to purely political settings and affects one of the household's most important financial decisions, their home transactions.
Neighborhood peer effects have been shown to affect households publicly observable decisions, but how they affect private decisions, like mortgage refinancing, remains unclear. Using precisely geolocated data and a nearest-neighbor research design, we find that households are 7% more likely to refinance if a neighbor within 50 m has recently refinanced. Consistent with a word-of-mouth mechanism, social influence effects are stronger when neighbors live especially nearby, weaker when owners are non-occupants, and stronger when neighbors and owners are of the same race. Our results suggest an important role for neighborhood peer effects in explaining regional variation in refinancing activity.
"A large share of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and say they would not be able to come up with $1,000 for an unexpected expense.” Based on the findings in his 2017 paper, “Does Household Finance Affect Elections? Evidence from a Housing Crisis,” a study of voting in the wake of the 2007-9 financial meltdown, McCartney said that he was “deeply concerned that household-level financial distress will decrease turnout, in addition to low turnout caused by the health crisis.”