Please note: This list may be outdated.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

In Progress (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].
• "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). 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

• Kohli, N, Aiken, E, and Blumenstock, JE (2024). Privacy Guarantees for Personal Mobility Data in Humanitarian Response, Nature Scientific Reports, 14: 28565 [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 [pdf]
• Dillon, B, Aker, J, and Blumenstock, JE (2024). Yellow Pages: Information, Connections, and Firm Performance, Economic Journal [pdf]
• 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]
• 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)

• Kahn, Z, Meyebinesso, C, Aiken, E, Kohli, N, and Blumenstock, JE (2025). Fairness and Representation in Satellite-Based Poverty Maps, ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2025) [pdf]
• Aiken, E, Rolf, E, and Blumenstock, JE (2023). Fairness and Representation in Satellite-Based Poverty Maps, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023) [pdf]
• Amaya, SR, Nair, S, Bjorkegren, D, and Blumenstock, JE (2023). Credit Scores That Prioritize Customer Welfare: Theory and Evidence from Nigeria, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2023) Workshop on Practical Machine Learning for Developing Countries
• Soman, S, Aiken E, Rolf, E, and Blumenstock, JE (2023). Can Strategic Data Collection Improve the Performance of Poverty Prediction Models?, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2023) Workshop on Practical Machine Learning for Developing Countries (Best Paper Award) [pdf]
• Shah, A, Nair, S, Bohnel, T, and Blumenstock, JE (2023). Sand Mining Watch: Leveraging Earth Observation Foundation Models to Inform Sustainable Development, NeurIPS 2023 Workshop On Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning [pdf]
• Ohlenberg, T, Aiken, E, and Blumenstock, JE (2023). Moving Targets: When Does A Poverty Prediction Model Need To Be Updated?, The ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO '23) [pdf]
• Aiken, E, Thakur, V, and Blumenstock, JE (2022). Phone Sharing and Cash Transfers in Togo: Quantitative Evidence from Mobile Phone Data, The ACM Conference on Computing Systems and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS '22) [pdf]
• Warren, R, Aiken, E, and Blumenstock, JE (2022). Home location detection from mobile phone data: Evidence from Togo, The ACM Conference on Computing Systems and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS '22) [pdf]
• 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]