Leah Boustan

Leah Platt Boustan is an economist who is currently a Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Her research interests include economic history, labour economics, and urban economics.^[1]

Biography

Leah Platt Boustan earned a BA in Economics from Princeton University in 2000, and her PhD in 2006 from Harvard University.^[2] Her dissertation, "The Effect of Black Migration on Northern Cities and Labor Markets, 1940-1970,” won the Economic History Association’s Alan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in US economic history that year.^[3]

She was a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles from 2006 through 2016, when she returned to Princeton as a full professor of Economics. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where she co-directs the Development of the American Economy Program. She is an editor of the Journal of Urban Economics and on the editorial board of the American Economic Review.^[4]

Research

Professor Boustan has studied 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. This book, building on Boustan's many published papers on the Great Migration, examines the impact of the Great Migration on labor markets and urban spaces in northern cities in the U.S. She shows that those who migrated greatly improved their earnings by moving North. However, these new migrants competed with other black workers in the North, slowing wage growth for those workers. Moreover, many white households reacted to black migration with white flight to the suburbs to avoid sharing public services with poorer black households.^[5] This book was awarded the Alice Hansen Jones Prize by the Economic History Association in 2018.^[6]

References