Please note: This list may be outdated. The PDF version of my C.V. is more reliable.

Working Papers

• "(Machine) Learning what Policies Value." (with Daniel Björkegren and Samsun Knight). Revise and Resubmit, Review of Economic Studies [pdf].
• "Training Machine Learning to Anticipate Manipulation." (with Daniel Björkegren and Samsun Knight). Reject and Resubmit, American Economic Review [pdf].
• "Yellow Pages: Information, Connections, and Firm Performance." (with Brian Dillon and Jenny Aker). Accepted, Economic Journal [pdf].
• "Insecurity and Firm Displacement: Evidence from Afghan Corporate Phone Records." (with Tarek Ghani, Sylvan Herskowitz, Ethan B. Kapstein, Thomas Scherer, and Ott Toomet). Conditionally Accepted, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy [pdf].
• "Privacy Guarantees for Personal Mobility Data in Humanitarian Response." (with Nitin Kohli and Emily Aiken). Revise and Resubmit, Nature Scientific Reports.
• "Probing the Limits of Mobile Phone Metadata for Poverty Prediction and Impact Evaluation." (with Oscar Barriga Cabanillas, Daniel Putman, and Travis Lybbert). Conditionally Accepted, Journal of Development Economics.
• "Instant Loans Can Lift Subjective Well-Being: A Randomized Evaluation of Digital Credit in Nigeria." (with Daniel Björkegren, Omowunmi Folajimi-Senjobi, Jacqueline Mauro, and Suraj Nair). Accepted, Economic Development and Cultural Change [pdf].
• "Measuring Religion from Behavior: Climate Shocks and Religious Adherence in Afghanistan." (with Oeindrila Dube and Michael Callen). NBER Working Paper w30694 [pdf].
• "Estimating impacts with surveys vs. digital traces: Evidence from randomized cash transfers in Togo." (with Emily Aiken, Suzanne Bellue, Dean Karlan, Chris Udry). NBER Working Paper No. 31751 [pdf].
• "Strengthening Fragile States: Evidence from Mobile Salary Payments in Afghanistan." (with Michael Callen, Anastasia Faikina, Stefano Fiorin, Tarek Ghani). CESifo Working Paper Series 10510 [pdf].
• "Satellite and Mobile Phone Data Reveal How Violence Affects Seasonal Migration in Afghanistan." (with Xiao Hui Tai, Shikhar Mehra, and Suraj Nair). Revise and Resubmit, Nature Communications.
• "Moving targets: The role of model and data recency in proxy means test accuracy." (with Emily Aiken, Tim Ohlenburg). Working Paper [pdf].
• "Big Data Privacy in Emerging Market Fintech and Financial Services: A Research Agenda." (with Nitin Kohli). CEGA Working Paper Series 231 [pdf].
• "The Impact of Digital Credit in Developing Economies: A Review of Recent Evidence." (with Jon Robinson and David Sungho Park). Working Paper [pdf].
• "The Impact of Mobile Phones: Experimental Evidence from the Random Assignment of New Cell Towers." (with Niall Keleher, Arman Rezaee, Erin Troland). Working Paper [pdf].
• "Digital Credit: A Snapshot of the Current Landscape and Open Research Questions." (with Eilin Francis and Jon Robinson). BREAD Working Paper No. 516 [pdf].

Journal Articles

• Blumenstock, JE, Chi, G, and Tan, X (2023). Migration and the Value of Social Networks, Review of Economic Studies [pdf]
• Aiken, E, Bellue, S, Karlan, D, Udry, C, and Blumenstock, JE (2022). Machine Learning and Phone Data Can Improve the Targeting of Humanitarian Aid, Nature, 603: 864-870 [pdf]
• Chi, G, Fang, S, and Blumenstock, JE (2022). Microestimates of Wealth and Poverty for all Low- and Middle-Income Countries, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(3), 1-11 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, Callen, M, Ghani, T, and Gonzalez, R (2024). Violence and Financial Decisions: Evidence from Mobile Money in Afghanistan, Review of Economics and Statistics, 106(2): 352-369
• Smythe, I, and Blumenstock, JE (2022). Geographic Micro-Targeting of Social Assistance with High-Resolution Poverty Maps, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(32), 1-10 [pdf]
• Tai, XH, Mehra, S, and Blumenstock, JE (2022). Mobile Phone Data Reveal the Effects of Violence on Internal Displacement, Nature Human Behavior, Vol 6: 623-634 [pdf]
• Aiken, EA, Bedoya, G, Blumenstock, JE, and Coville, A (2022). Program Targeting with Machine Learning and Mobile Phone Data: Evidence from an Anti-Poverty Intervention in Afghanistan, Journal of Development Economics [pdf]
• Ilin, C, Annan-Phan, S, Tai, XH, Mehra, S, Hsiang, S, and Blumenstock, JE (2021). Public Mobility Data Enables COVID-19 Forecasting and Management at Local and Global Scales, Nature Scientific Reports, 11 (1), 1-11 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE (2020). Machine learning can help get COVID-19 aid to those who need it most, Nature, 581 (7807)
• Chi, G, Lin, F, Chi, G, and Blumenstock, JE (2020). A general approach to detecting migration events in digital trace data, PLOS ONE, 15 (10) [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, Callen, M, and Ghani, T (2018). Why Do Defaults Affect Behavior? Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan, American Economic Review, 108 (10), 2868-2901 [pdf]
• Park, PS, Blumenstock, JE, and Macy, MW (2018). The strength of long-range ties in population-scale social networks, Science, 362(6421), 1410-1413 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE (2018). Don't forget people in the use of big data for development, Nature, 561 (7722), 170-172 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE (2018). Estimating Economic Characteristics with Phone Data, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 108, 72-76 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE (2016). Fighting Poverty with Data, Science, 353(6301), 753-754 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, Eagle, N, Fafchamps, M (2016). Airtime Transfers and Mobile Communications: Evidence in the Aftermath of Natural Disasters, Journal of Development Economics, 120, 157-181 [pdf]
• Steele, Sundsoy, Pezzulo, Alegana, Blumenstock, JE, Bjelland, Engo-Monsen, de Montjoye, Iqbal, Hadiuzzaman, Wetter, Tatem, and Bengtsson, L. (2017). Mapping poverty using mobile phone and satellite data, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 14:20160690 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, Cadamuro, G, On, R (2015). Predicting Poverty and Wealth from Mobile Phone Metadata, Science, 350(6264), 1073-1076 [pdf]
• Aker, J and Blumenstock, JE (2014). The Economic Impacts of New Technologies in Africa, The Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, 354-371 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, and N Eagle (2012). Divided We Call: Disparities in Access and Use of Mobile Phones in Rwanda, Information Technology and International Development, 8(2), 1-16 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE (2012). Inferring Patterns of Internal Migration from Mobile Phone Call Records, Information Technology for Development, 18(2), 107-125 [pdf]
• Gordon, GJ, RV Jensen, LL Hsiao, SR Gullans, JE Blumenstock, WG Richards, MT Jaklitsch, DJ Sugarbaker, and R Bueno (2003). Using Gene Expression Ratios to Predict Outcome Among Patients With Mesothelioma, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 95(8), 598-605 [pdf]
• Gordon, GJ, RV Jensen, LL Hsiao, SR Gullans, JE Blumenstock, S Ramaswamy, WG Richards, DJ Sugarbaker, and R Bueno (2002). Translation of Microarray Data Into Clinically Relevant Cancer Diagnostic Tests Using Gene Expression Ratios in Lung Cancer and Mesothelioma, Cancer Research, 62(17), 4963-4967 [pdf]
• Fryer, RM, J Randall, T Yoshida, LL Hsiao, JE Blumenstock, KE Jensen, T Dimofte, RV Jensen, and SR Gullans (2002). Global Analysis of Gene Expression: Methods, Interpretation, and Pitfalls, Experimental Nephrology, 10(2), 64-74 [pdf]
• Hsiao, LL, RV Jensen, T Yoshida, KE Clark, JE Blumenstock, and SR Gullans (2002). Correcting for Signal Errors in the Analysis of Microarray Data, Biotechniques, 32 (2), 330-337 [pdf]

Conference Articles (Peer Reviewed)

• Bjorekgren, D, Knight, S, and Blumenstock, JE (2021). (Machine) Learning What Policymakers Value, ACM conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO '21) [pdf]
• Rolf, Simchowitz, Dean, Liu, Björkegren, Hardt, and Blumenstock (2020). Score-Based Classifiers for Welfare-Aware Machine Learning, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML '20) [pdf]
• Björkegren, D, Blumenstock, JE, and Knight, S (2019). (Machine) Learning what Governments Value, The Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS '20), Workshop on Machine Learning for the Developing World
• Khan, MR, and Blumenstock, JE (2019). Multi-GCN: Graph Convolutional Networks for Multi-View Networks, with Applications to Global Poverty, The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019), Honolulu, HI [pdf]
• Cadamuro, G, Vinayak, RK, Shapiro, JN, Blumenstock, JE, and Kakade, S (2019). The Illusion of Change: Correcting for Bias when Inferring Changes in Sparse, Societal-Scale Data, The 30th Annual Web Conference 2019 (WWW 2019), San Francisco, CA [pdf]
• Aulck, L, Nambi, D, Velagapudo, N, Blumenstock, JE, West, J (2019). Mining University Registrar Records to Predict First-Year Undergraduate Attrition, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 19) [pdf]
• Chi, G, State, B, Blumenstock, JE, and Adamic, L (2019). Who ties the world together? Evidence from a Large Online Social Network, The 8th International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (COMPLEX NETWORKS 2019). Lisbon, Portugal
• Weld, G, Perrier, T, Aker, J, Blumenstock, JE, Dillon, B, Kamazi, A, Kokushubira, E, Webster, J, and Anderson, R (2018). eKichabi: Information Access through Basic Mobile Phones in Rural Tanzania, Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Paper No. 133 (CHI 2018) [pdf]
• Khan, MR, and Blumenstock, JE (2017). Determinants of Mobile Money Adoption in Pakistan, The Thirty-first Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS '17), Workshop on Machine Learning for the Developing World [pdf]
• Head, A, Manguin, M, Tran, N, and Blumenstock, JE (2017). Can Human Development be Measured with Satellite Imagery?, Proceedings of the 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2017) [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, Maldeniya, D, and Lokanathan, S (2017). Understanding the Impact of Urban Infrastructure: New Insights from Population-Scale Data, Proceedings of the 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2017) [pdf]
• Shah, K, Martinez, P, Blumenstock, JE, Dionisio, J, and Heimerl, K (2017). An Investigation of Phone Upgrades in Remote Community Cellular Networks, Proceedings of the 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2017) [pdf]
• Khan, MR, Blumenstock, JE (2016). Predictors without Borders: Behavioral Modeling of Product Adoption in Three Developing Countries, Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '16) [pdf]
• Aulck, L, Blumenstock, JE, West, J (2016). Predicting Student Dropout in Higher Education, Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML '16), Workshop on Machine Learning in Social Good Applications
• Blumenstock, JE, Keleher, N, Reisinger, J (2016). The Premise of Local Information: Building Reliable Economic Indicators from a Decentralized Network of Contributor, Proceedings of the 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2016), Notes Track [pdf]
• Khan, M, Reed, P, and Blumenstock, JE (2016). Observing gender dynamics and disparities with mobile phone metadata, Proceedings of the 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2016), Notes Track [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, Keleher, N (2015). The Price is Right? Statistical evaluation of a crowd-sourced market information system in Liberia, ACM Computing for Development (DEV 2015) [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, Callen, MC, Ghani, T, Koepke, L (2015). Promises and Pitfalls of Mobile Money in Afghanistan: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial, Proceedings of the 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2015) [pdf]
• Khan, M, Manoj, J, Singh, A, and Blumenstock, JE (2015). Behavioral Modeling for Churn Prediction: Early Indicators and Accurate Predictors of Customer Defection and Loyalty, 2015 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (Big Data `15)
• Blumenstock, JE (2014). Calling for Better Measurement: Estimating an Individual's Wealth and Well-Being, ACM KDD (Data Mining for Social Good) [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, Chokkalingam, R, Gaikwad, V and S Kondepudi (2014). Probabilistic Inference of Unknown Locations: Exploiting Collective Behavior when Individual Data is Scarce, ACM Computing for Development (DEV 2014) [pdf]
• Young, WM, Blumenstock, JE, Fox, EB, and TM McCormick (2014). Detecting and classifying anomalous behavior in spatiotemporal network data, ACM KDD (Learning About Emergencies with Social Information) [pdf]
• Kelley, I, and Blumentock, JE (2014). Computational Challenges in the Analysis of Large, Sparse, Spatiotemporal Data, The 6th ACM International Workshop on Data Intensive Distributed Computing (DIDC `14)
• Blumenstock, JE and Fratamico L (2013). Social and Spatial Ethnic Segregation: A Framework for Analyzing Segregation With Large-Scale Spatial Network Data, The 4th Annual ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (DEV '13) [pdf]
• Heimerl, K, Ali, K, Blumenstock, JE, Gawalt, B, and E Brewer (2013). Expanding Rural Cellular Networks with Virtual Coverage, 10th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation [pdf]
• Mehrohtra, A, V Mohan, A Nguyen, and JE Blumenstock (2012). Differences in phone use between men and women: Quantitative evidence from Rwanda, Proceedings of the 5th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2012), 297-306 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE (2011). Using Mobile Phone Data to Measure the Ties Between Nations, Proceedings of the 2011 iConference, 195-202 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, and N Eagle (2010). Mobile Divides: Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda, Proceedings of the 4th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2010), 6 [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, Y Shen and N Eagle (2010). A Method for Estimating the Relationship Between Phone Use and Wealth, ICTD 2010 (Workshop on Quantitative Meets Qualitative Methods) [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE, D Gillick, and N Eagle (2010). Who's Calling? Demographics of Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda, AAAI Spring Symposium [pdf]
• Blumenstock, JE (2008). Size Matters: Word Count as a Measure of Quality on Wikipedia, Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW), ACM Press, 2008, 1095-1096 [pdf]
• Gemmell, J, R Lueder, JE Blumenstock, E Solomon, and G Bell (2003). Telephone, Television and Radio in the Home of the Future, Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications, 2003, 263-268 [pdf]