Leah Boustan

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]

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 published papers, examines the impact of the Great Migration on employment, wages, and urban spaces in northern U.S. cities. The book shows that those who migrated earned on average much more in the North. These migrants competed for jobs with other black workers in the North, slowing wage growth for those workers. Many white households reacted to black migration with "white flight", moving to the suburbs apparently 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] Her research was also awarded the 2019 IZA Young Economist Award.[7]

Boustan is among the leaders in using advanced analytical techniques to answer major questions of economic history by linking individuals and families across large datasets, such as newly digitized Census records, from the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, in work with Philipp Ager and Katherine Eriksson, she linked data on the sons of slaveholders to show that these men were better off economically in the 1880 Census Records than the sons of nearby families with similar levels of wealth but fewer slaves in the 1860 Census.[8]