Dr. Ang Liu | Real Estate | Best Researcher Award
PhD Candidate & Instructor at Rutgers University | United States
Ang Liu is an emerging interdisciplinary scholar whose research spans urban studies, economic geography, housing policy, and the financialization of real estate, with particular attention to how debt, financial instruments, and state–market interactions shape contemporary urban development. His work offers critical insights into housing production, developer practices, financialized urban governance, and technological transformations such as REITs and blockchain-based tokenization. He has published in leading journals including Economic Geography, Urban Geography, Geoforum, Human Geography, and Finance and Space, contributing influential studies on fake equity in housing production, ghost housing dynamics, decentralized finance, and comparative real estate systems. His active research pipeline includes projects on nighttime illumination and housing prices, off-book local government debt, homeownership and political attitudes, and housing satisfaction across building types. His Google Scholar metrics reflect a growing impact, with 58 citations, an h-index of 3, and an i10-index of 3. Alongside his scholarship, Liu serves as a reviewer for multiple international journals and contributes to major academic associations through committee participation and editorial development initiatives. His teaching covers themes in Chinese urbanism, politics of housing and financialization, and urban economics, cultivating interdisciplinary engagement among students. Complementing his academic work, he brings professional experience in real estate investment and financial product design, which enriches his research with applied understanding of market mechanisms, financial modeling, and capital flows. Collectively, Liu’s scholarship advances rigorous conceptual and empirical contributions to understanding financial architectures, housing systems, and the evolving geographies of global urban change.
Profiles: Google Scholar | Orcid | Staff Page
Featured Publications
Liu, A., & Chen, C. (2025). From real estate financialization to decentralization: A comparative review of REITs and blockchain-based tokenization. Geoforum, 159, 104193.
Zeng, X., Gao, Y., Liu, A., & Song, F. (2024). Similar data points identification with LLM: A human-in-the-loop strategy using summarization and hidden state insights. International Journal on Cybernetics & Informatics, 13, 179–192.
Jia, M., Liu, A., & Narahara, T. (2024). The integration of dual evaluation and minimum spanning tree clustering to support decision-making in territorial spatial planning. Sustainability, 16(10), 3928.
Liu, A., Jia, M., & Chen, C. (2025). From speculative dreams to ghost housing realities: Homeless homeowners and failed future-making in urban development. Urban Geography, 1–21.
Liu, A. (2025). Financialization versus technologization: Can technology replace finance in global hegemony? Human Geography.