Experts and Staff

Julie Yixia Cai is an economist on the domestic team at CEPR, where she works on a variety of issues relating to labor market conditions, racial and gender disparities, economic well-being, and social policy. Her research interests include household income volatility, job quality, economic inequality, and poverty.

Her recent papers examine the safety net’s buffering effects in the context of job/work-hour instability, the impacts of housing subsidies on poverty, the effects of earnings instability on child protection, and child poverty measurement. She occasionally teaches a course on research methods for social policy track students at Columbia University.

Cai earned her PhD in social welfare with a minor in public affairs from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2021. She is an external affiliate with the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy. She was a visiting fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from 2022 to 2023.

Curriculum vitae