Leah Boustan Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The Director of the Program in Economic History studies labor markets and immigration.
Professor Leah Boustan has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Boustan is one of seven economists in the 2026 class of one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious learned societies.
Boustan, who joined Yale’s economics department in 2025 from Princeton, studies questions at the intersection of history and labor markets. Her books, “Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets,” on the Southern Black migration to the north during and after World War II, and “Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success,” (co-authored with Ran Abramitzky), examining immigration assimilation in the 19th and 20th century America, have won numerous awards. She presented early findings from her current research, comparing immigrant job success in modern Europe and the US, at this year's American Economic Association meetings' Distinguished Lecture, the video can be viewed here.
She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she is co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program. She also serves as co-editor at the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
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