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Faculty

Leah Boustan

Professor of Economics
Office Address
87 Trumbull Street, Room B335

Leah Boustan is a Professor of Economics at Yale University. 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.

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 first book, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets (Princeton University Press, 2016) won the Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award from the Social Science History Association and the Alice Hanson Jones Award from the Economic History Association. Her second book, Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success (co-authored with Ran Abramitzky; PublicAffairs, 2022), was listed on The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022, Forbes’ Best Business Books of 2022, and Behavioral Scientist’s Notable Books of 2022.

Professor Boustan was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2012, the IZA Young Labor Economist Award in 2019, and was named a Fellow of the Econometrics Society in 2022 and of the Society of Labor Economists in 2024. She received an A.B. degree in Economics from Princeton University in 2000, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 2006.

 

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Project

Census Linking Project

The Census Linking Project offers researchers the ability to create longitudinal datasets using historical US Census data (1850-1940). We provide links between each pair of complete-count Censuses using a wide variety of linking algorithms.

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Latest Public Lecture

The American Dream Lecture Series: Immigration and the American Dream

April 24, 2025
Washington, DC

Visits

Visiting from:
Princeton University
Academic Year:
AY 24-25