Leah Boustan

Leah Boustan is a professor of economics at Princeton University, where she is also a faculty associate of the Industrial Relations Section. Her research lies at the intersection between economic history and labor economics. Her book, "Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets" (Princeton University Press, 2016) examines the effect of the Great Black Migration from the rural south during and after World War II.

Professor Boustan is co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She also serves as co-editor at the Journal of Urban Economics and on the editorial board of the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Professor Boustan was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, a Research Fellow at the Straus Institute at the NYU School of Law, and was awarded the Young Labor Economist Award from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.

Her recent work has been on the mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is currently working on a book on immigration and the American Dream (joint with Ran Abramitzky, Stanford) under contract at PublicAffairs. The book is based on a decade of work on the Age of Mass Migration from Europe, including topics such as who chooses to move to the U.S. and how that has changed over time, how immigrants fare in the U.S. economy, and the effect of immigration on U.S.-born workers. Her research on immigration issues has been published a leading economics journals

EDUCATION

• Ph.D. in Economics, Harvard University (2006)
• A.B. in Economics summa cum laude, Princeton University (2000)