Technical Papers

• Unemployment Insurance and worker mobility, by Ryan Nunn, Laura Kawano and Ben Klemens, Urban/Brookings Tax Policy Center report, February 2018. Brookings summary PDF
• Intellectual Property Boxes and the Paradox of Price Discrimination, Center for Economic Priorities Working Paper, May 2017. Summary Paper [PR]
• Valuing patents and trademarks in complex production chains, December 2015. SSRN page PDF
• Estimating local poverty measures using satellite images: A pilot application to Central America, World Bank Policy Research Paper #7329, June 2015. World Bank WPs [PR]
• A Useful Algebraic System of Statistical Models, Census Bureau Research Report Series (Statistics), May 2013. Arxiv Census PDF [PR]
• A Peer-based Model of Fat-tailed Outcomes, Arxiv, April 2013. Arxiv page
• Mutual Information as a Measure of Intercoder Agreement, Journal of Official Statistics, October 2012. Link R script [PR]
• Tea for Survey Processing, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Conference of European Statisticians, September 2012. Proceedings PDF
• Finding Optimal Agent-based Models, Center on Social and Economic Dynamics Working Paper #49, September 2007. SSRN page [PR]
• A genome-wide association study implicates diacylglycerol kinase eta (DGKH) and several other genes in the etiology of bipolar disorder, by AE Baum, N Akula, M Cabanero, I Cardona, W Corona, B Klemens, TG Schulze, S Cichon, M Rietschel, MM Nathen, A Georgi, J Schumacher, M Schwarz, R Abou Jamra, S Hofels, P Propping, J Satagopan, NIMH Genetics Initiative Bipolar Disorder Consortium, SD Detera-Wadleigh, J Hardy, and FJ McMahon. Molecular Psychiatry, 2008 (13:2), pp 197-207. Link [PR]
• An Efficient Network Generation Method: Interpersonal Networks and the Distribution of Links, December 2005. PDF SSRN page
• Social Influences and Smoking Behavior, Brookings Report to the American Legacy Foundation, February 2006. PDF
• Preferences with a Social Component, July 2003. PDF
• Dissertation: Information Aggregation, California Institute of Technology, May 2003. PDF [PR]
• When do Ordered Priors Induce Ordered Posteriors?, September 2002. SSRN page

Books

• 21st Century C, O'Reilly Media, September 2012. Buy!. See also C im 21. Jahrhundert, 21 世紀 C 語言, and Язык C в XXI веке [PR]
• Modeling with Data, Princeton University Press, October 2008. web site Princeton U Press page [PR]
• Math You Can't Use: patents, copyright, and software, Brookings Institution Press, November 2005. Chapter 1 PDF, Chapter 6 PDF, Buy! [PR]

Policy papers

• Software patents poised to make a comeback under new patent office rules, Ars Technica, 10 January 2019. Link
• The Beauty Contest: How Cities are Shaped by What We Think Others Think, with Erica C Barnett, Strong Towns, November 2018. Part 1 Part 2
• 5 Q’s for Census Statistics Expert Ben Klemens, Interview with The Center for Data Innovation, October 2014. Link
• Copyright Law and the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts by Alina Ng, Science and Public Policy, May 2012. Link
• U.S. expanding the law - domestic and foreign - to benefit corporations, San Francisco Chronicle, 17 February 2008 p E, February 2008. Link
• The Rise of the Information Processing patent, Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law, 14:1, pp 1--37, January 2008. PDF SSRN page [PR]
• U.S. Patent Imperialism Hurts American Interests, Washington Post, 25 August 2006, August 2006. Link
• Net neutrality fosters competition between technologies, 17 August 2006. Op-ed distributed by Scripps-Howard News Service
• The Supreme Court's Patent Trilogy: An Analysis, May 2006. Brooking op-ed
• The Gravity of the U.S. Patent Swindle, Wall Street Journal, 25 March 2006, p A9, March 2006. Link
• New Legal Code, IEEE Spectrum, pp 60-62, August 2005. Link
• Software Patents Don't Compute, IEEE Spectrum, pp 56-59, July 2005. Link
• The Computer-shaped Hole in the Patent Reform Act, July 2005. Brooking op-ed
• Shadowing Bush, November 2004. Brookings op-ed
• Social Norms and Voter Turnout, January 2004. Brookings op-ed

Major software programs

• 1040.js, a personal tax flowchart. Link Pitch to IRS
• Tea for survey processing, with Rolando Rodríguez. Link
• Apophenia: a library of statistics functions, focusing on modular, cross-paradigm modeling. Link
• Writing appendices in LaTeX: a short macro package for writing theorems in a manner that facilitates moving proofs to an appendix. [Also available from the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN).]
• An agent-based model of migration and demography: project for ECA region of World Bank.

Live events

• Transforming and Combining Statistical Models, Data Science DC @ George Washington University, August 2014. PDF slides, MP3 audio
• A Simulation of Nonresponse and Imputation, 2013--14 Program on Computational Methods in Social Sciences (CMSS), August 2013. Event agenda, PDF slides
• Designing a cross-paradigm modeling framework. Neyman Seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Statistics 8 May 2013; invited talk at Stanford University Department of Statistics 14 May 2013, PDF slides.
• Appearance in Patent Absurdity, a documentary, 2010. Watch here
• Co-producer and speaker for Brookings Conference, "The Limits of Abstract Patents in an Intangible Economy", January 2009. Brookings conference site, my PDF slides
• Keynote speech, NISS exploration workshop on agent-based modeling , 20-21 November 2008. PDF slides
• Interview by David Levine on Stanford Radio's Hearsay Culture, 10 August 2007. MP3
• Panelist: Tech Policy Week, 5 May 2007. link
• Poster: DNA Pooling for Whole-Genome Association Studies with Illumina Infinium Assays, by Amber E. Baum, Nirmala Akula, Ben Klemens, Imer Cardona, Winston Corona, Andrew Singleton, John Hardy, Sevilla Detera-Wadleigh, Francis J. McMahon, October 2006. PPT, PDF
• The Kojo Nnamdi Show: "The Legal Battle over Software" (National Public Radio discussion), January 2006. info, MP3
• Producer and moderator for "Software and Law: Is Regulation Fostering or Inhibiting Innovation?" (Brookings panel), December 2005. transcript
• Graduate class on networks and information (Johns Hopkins Econ dept), February-May 2005. reading list and notes

Fun

• Bamboo Harvest, a game of building and resource management.
• Carbondale, a game of building a local social and business network, designed for two standard decks of cards.
• Cowsweeper: a variant of Minesweeper, which can be played online (if you are using a Java-enabled browser) or be downloaded and played on a PalmOS device, if you can still find one. [Available from many other sources.]
• Why the kurtosis of a N(0,1) is three, February, 2003. PDF