Kai Liu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge. He previously worked at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, Norway. His primary research and teaching interests are in labor economics, public economics and applied microeconometrics. He also works on the economics of China. He received his Ph.D. in economics in 2011 from the Johns Hopkins University.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in August 2014.