Leah Boustan is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University and a faculty associate of the Industrial Relations Section. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she is co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program. She is co-editor at the Journal of Urban Economics and on the editorial board of the American Economic Review. Professor Boustan was a member of the economics department at the University of California-Los Angeles from 2006 to 2016.

Professor Boustan’s research lies at the intersection between economic history and labor economics. She has worked on the Great Black Migration from the rural south during and after World War II and the mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her book, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets, was published by Princeton University Press in 2016.

Professor Boustan was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2012 and was a Research Fellow at the Straus Institute at the NYU School of Law in 2013. She received an A.B. degree in Economics from Princeton University in 2000, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 2006.