Professor McCartney is an Assistant Professor of Commerce at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

His research investigates how social interactions, civic engagement, and politics connect household finance, real estate, and urban economics. His work has been published in Journal of Urban Economics; Management Science; and The Review of Financial Studies. It has also been presented at the AFA Annual Meeting, AREUEA Annual Conference, MFA Annual Meeting, NBER Summer Institute, SFS Cavalcade, and UEA Annual Meeting and appeared in Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, and The New York Times.

He teaches Financial Management, a core class covering financial statement analysis, the time value of money, and the weighted average cost of capital, in the M.S. in Commerce Program at McIntire.

Before joining UVA in 2022, he was an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University. He earned his Ph.D. in Finance from Duke University and his B.S. in Actuarial Science from Purdue University.