I work on the economic implications of machine intelligence, informed by insights from low-income regions.

I am Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. I lead the AI and Development initiative at CDEP, and am a non-resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development, an affiliate of BREAD and J-PAL, and a member of the Data Science Institute. I have a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
My contact is dan[@]bjorkegren[.]com and office is IAB 1401B.



Selected writing:
AI is transforming the economy. Understanding its impact requires both data and imagination
Nature (2025)
Market Beliefs about Open vs. Closed AI
Artificial Intelligence for the Poor
Foreign Affairs (2023)
Media: The Economist, BBC World Service
Could AI Leapfrog the Web? Evidence from Teachers in Sierra Leone
with Jun Ho Choi, Divya Budihal, Dominic Sobhani, Oliver Garrod, and Paul Atherton
Revision requested, PNAS Nexus.
Media: The Economist, Development Impact
Manipulation-Robust Prediction
with Joshua Blumenstock and Samsun Knight
Accepted, American Economic Review
What Do Policies Value?
with Joshua Blumenstock and Samsun Knight
Review of Economic Studies (2025)
Public and Private Transit: Evidence from Lagos
with Alice Duhaut, Geetika Nagpal, and Nick Tsivanidis
Revision requested, American Economic Review
Causal Inference from Hypothetical Evaluations
with B. Douglas Bernheim, Jeffrey Naecker, and Michael Pollmann
Reject-and-resubmitted, Journal of Political Economy
The Adoption of Network Goods: Evidence from the Spread of Mobile Phones in Rwanda
Review of Economic Studies (2019)
Score-Based Classifiers for Welfare-Aware Machine Learning
Rolf, Simchowitz, Dean, Liu, Björkegren, Hardt, and Blumenstock
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) (2020)