Leah Boustan is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where she is also a faculty associate of the Industrial Relations Section. Her research lies at the intersection between economic history and labor economics. Her book, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets (Princeton University Press, 2016) examines the effect of the Great Black Migration from the rural south during and after World War II. Her recent work has been on the mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Professor Boustan is co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She also serves as co-editor at the Journal of Urban Economics and on the editorial board of the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. 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 joined IZA as a Research Fellow in May 2019.