Sirui (Sherry) Cai
I am a PhD candidate in Business Administration with a concentration in Real Estate at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University.
My research sits at the intersection of household finance and urban economics. I study how mortgage markets price risks that are difficult to observe at origination — job-loss risk and flood risk. I also study inconsistencies in property tax assessments across property types.
On the job market
I am on the 2026–27 academic job market. I will attend:
- FMA Annual Meeting — Tampa, FL, October 14–17, 2026
- AREUEA–ASSA Meetings — Washington, DC, January 2027
My job market paper is What Lenders See and Miss: Job-Loss Risk in Mortgage Lending. It builds job-loss risk indices from LinkedIn career histories of more than 52 million workers and shows that they predict early mortgage default — yet lenders only partially recognize this risk, and the unpriced exposure is transferred to the secondary market.
Research interests
Household Finance · Mortgages · Urban Economics · Commercial Real Estate · Generative AI
Education
- PhD, Business Administration (concentration in Real Estate) — Georgia State University, 2021–2027 (expected)
- MSc, Business and Finance — University of Warwick, 2019–2020
- BA, Accounting — Hong Kong Baptist University, 2015–2019
Teaching
I have been instructor for four undergraduate real estate courses at Georgia State University, with a mean student rating of 4.79 / 5.00, and received the GSU Graduate Teaching Assistant Teaching Excellence Award in 2026.