Publications
2026
Herskowitz, S, Blumenstock, JE, Ghani, T, Kapstein, E, Scherer, T, and Toomet O (2026). Insecurity and Firm Displacement: Evidence from Afghan Corporate Phone Records, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 18 (1): 69-91 [pdf]
Aiken, E, Blumenstock, JE, Milusheva, S, and Smith, M (2026). Predicting Well-Being with Mobile Phone Data: Evidence from Four Countries, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings [pdf]
2025
Björkegren, D, Blumenstock, JE, and Knight, S (2025). What Do Policies Value? Review of Economic Studies [pdf]
Aiken, E, Bellue, S, Blumenstock, JE, Karlan, D, and Udry, C (2025). Estimating impacts with surveys vs. digital traces: Evidence from randomized cash transfers in Togo, Journal of Development Economics, 175:103477 [pdf]
Björkegren, D, Blumenstock, JE, Folajimi-Senjobi, O, Mauro, J, and Nair, S. (2025). Welfare Impacts of Digital Credit: A Randomized Evaluation in Nigeria, Economic Development and Cultural Change [pdf]
Blumenstock, JE, Chi, G, and Tan, X (2025). Migration and the Value of Social Networks, Review of Economic Studies, 92(1):97-128 [pdf]
Constenla-Villoslada, S., Liu,Y., McBride, L., Ouma, C., Mutanda, N., & Barrett, C.B. (2025). High-frequency monitoring enables machine learning–based forecasting of acute child malnutrition for early warning, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 122 (23) e2416161122, [pdf]
Dillon, B, Aker, J, and Blumenstock, JE (2025). Yellow Pages: Information, Connections, and Firm Performance, Economic Journal [pdf]
Blumenstock, JE, Cabanillas, OB, Lybbert, T, and Putman, D (2025). Probing the Limits of Mobile Phone Metadata for Poverty Prediction and Impact Evaluation, Journal of Development Economics, 174:103462 [pdf]
Kahn, Zoe, Meyebinesso Farida Carelle Pere, Emily Aiken, Nitin Kohli, and Joshua E. Blumenstock. “Expanding Perspectives on Data Privacy: Insights from Rural Togo.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 9, no. 2 (2025): 1-29. [pdf]
Narayan, Sanjiv M., Nitin Kohli, and Megan M. Martin. “Addressing contemporary threats in anonymised healthcare data using privacy engineering.” Nature Digital Medicine 8, no. 1 (2025): 145. [pdf]
Shah, A., Waldmann, L., Wang, Y., Lehmann, N., Stewart, A., Xiong, Z., Zhu, X.X., Bauer, S. and Chuang, J., 2025. Panopticon: Advancing any-sensor foundation models for earth observation. In Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (pp. 2204-2214) (Best Paper). [pdf]
Shah, A., Singh, R., Zaytar, A., Tadesse, G. A., Robinson, C., Tafti, N., Wood, S. A., Dodhia, R., & Ferres, J. M. L. (2025). Remote Sensing Reveals Adoption of Sustainable Rice Farming Practices Across Punjab, India (No. arXiv:2507.08605). arXiv. [pdf]
Shah, A., Abdullah, Z., & Chuang, J. (2025). Exploring the Social Cost of Carbon for Internal Carbon Pricing: Insights from a Technology Probe. Available at SSRN [pdf]
2024
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]
Kohli, N, Aiken, E, and Blumenstock, JE (2024). Privacy Guarantees for Personal Mobility Data in Humanitarian Response, Nature Scientific Reports, 14: 28565 [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]
2023
Kohli, Nitin, and Paul Laskowski. “Differential privacy for black-box statistical analyses.” Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (2023). [pdf]
Shah, A., & Nair, S. R. (2023, July 21). Mapping Construction Grade Sand: Stepping Stones Towards Sustainable Development. 2023 ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Workshop: Fragile Earth: AI for Climate Sustainability – from Wildfire Disaster Management to Public Health and Beyond. [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]
2022
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]
2021
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]
2020
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]
2019
Rolf, E, Simchowitz, M, Dean, S, Liu, L, Björkegren, D, Hardt, M, and Blumenstock, JE (2019). Balancing Competing Objectives for Welfare-Aware Machine Learning with Imperfect Data, The Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS ’20), Joint Workshop on AI for Social Good (Best Paper Award)
Khan, MR, and Blumenstock, JE (2019). Multi-CGN: Graph Convolutional Networks for Multi-View Networks, with Applications to Global Poverty, The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019), Honolulu, HI
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
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
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)
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
2018
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]
2017
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]
Khan, M.R., Blumenstock, J.E., 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. Long Beach, CA.
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]
2016
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]
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, J (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]
2015
Blumenstock, JE, Cadamuro, G, On, R (2015). Predicting Poverty and Wealth from Mobile Phone Metadata, Science, 350(6264), 1073-1076 [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 Blumentock, J (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)
2014
Aker, J and Blumenstock, J (2014). The Economic Impacts of New Technologies in Africa, The Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, 354-371
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, J (2014). Computational Challenges in the Analysis of Large, Sparse, Spatiotemporal Data, The 6th ACM International Workshop on Data Intensive Distributed Computing (DIDC `14)
2013
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]
2012
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]
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]