Background

Michael-Paul (Jack Kelly) James joined the University of South Carolina in 2026 in a joint appointment between the Darla Moore School of Business and the College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management. James was brought in to help build a new real estate concentration offered through HRSM, developed as a collaboration between the two colleges. His own background is similarly cross-disciplinary, spanning architecture, urban design, real estate, public policy, and business administration in addition to finance, and his research reflects that range: he studies how financial decisions and the built environment shape one another.

Teaching

At UNC Charlotte, James served as Instructor of Record for six years, teaching Real Estate Principles, Real Estate Finance, Asset and Property Management, Financial Management, and Investments, and was a finalist for the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. His teaching method combines scaffolded learning, repeated exposure to material across multiple formats, with engineered peer networks that structure how students interact with each other. Frequent low-stakes testing is central to the design, grounded in the testing effect, the finding that retrieval practice produces stronger long-term retention than restudying material. The approach draws on a year of formal training in learning science under Dr. Judith Krauss, a behavioral psychologist, through the Graduate School Teaching Fellowship (2022-2023), as well as years of teaching across varied settings, including athletics coaching, dance, high school, and Sunday school.

Research

James's research examines how political identity, behavioral bias, and social structure shape financial decisions.

Publications:

• "When the Train Never Comes: Property Value Impacts from the Announcement and Cancellation of a Light Rail Project," The
• Professional Geographer (2025), with Isabelle Nilsson and Elizabeth C. Delmelle.
• "The Mere Exposure Effect in Architecture," in Humanizing Digital Reality (2018), with Christopher Beorkrem and Jefferson
• Ellinger.

Research in progress:

• A study of how political alignment shapes housing transactions, using matched voter registration and housing transaction data; the work was featured in The Wall Street Journal.
• A study of competition, visibility, and partisan bias in sell-side equity research, recently presented in Amsterdam.
• A study of whether loan officer relationships influence mortgage refinancing decisions.
• A study testing whether scaffolded learning and engineered peer networks improve retention and classroom engagement, based on his own teaching framework.

Education

• Ph.D., Business Administration (Finance), University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2026
• Graduate Certificate, Public Policy Research and Analysis, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2021
• M.B.A., University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2020
• M.S., Real Estate, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2019
• M.S., Urban Design, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2018
• M.Arch., University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2018
• B.M., Music Composition, Georgia Southern University, 2000, Magna Cum Laude