From 1993 to 1994, Chen served as the executive secretary of the Hwa Yue Foundation, a charity organization located in
Taipei, Taiwan that was founded in 1990 and has supported numerous Buddhist and charity projects across Asia. During
Bill Clinton's presidency, she served as a staff economist in the
Council of Economic Advisors in the
White House from 1999 to 2000. In 2000, she returned to her alma mater Harvard University as advisor of undergraduate studies for the economics department, and a postdoctoral researcher from 2002 to 2003. From September 2003 to the present, she has been an associate professor in the department of economics at the University of Washington, where she is a Gary Waterman Distinguished Scholar and graduate program director of the department of economics at the University of Washington. Moreover, she is a research associate for the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis for the National University of Australia. From 2005 till 2011, she has served as a visiting researcher and visiting assistant professor. She has served as a visiting researcher for the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank (2006),
Reserve Bank of New Zealand (2006), and at
Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. In 2007, she served as a visiting assistant professor for the department of economics at Harvard University. She has also done extensive research on
international finance,
macroeconomics,
open economy macroeconomics,
trade and development, and
applied economics and has published several publications. In 2019, she helped organized the inaugural Australasian Conference on International Macroeconomics. Her research includes "Can Exchange Rates Forecast Commodity Prices?", "Forecasting Inflation using Commodity Price Aggregates", and "Accounting for Differences in Economic Growth" == Grants ==