Prof. Chen has been working on housing research since the 1990s, her research focusing on East Asian countries and the United States. The idea to expand the comparative research to European countries originated from her involvement in Taiwan’s social housing movement since 2010. Prof. Chen was invited to several workshops and built connections with leading international housing researchers and practitioners. Her publications are mostly about housing and urban development in Taiwan from political-economic and feminist perspectives. In 2019, she edited a book with LSE geography professor Hyun Bang Shin, Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (The Contemporary City) by Palgrave Macmillan. 
Currently, Prof. Chen Yi-Ling is working on projects comparing the formation of social housing in South Korea and Taiwan, the neoliberalization of housing policies in Amsterdam, and various forms of social housing in Europe.