Leah Boustan, a renowned scholar whose research lies at the intersection of economic history and labor economics, has been named the Malcolm K. Brachman Professor of Economics, effective July 1.
Boustan, who joined Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in 2025, is also the director of Yale's Program in Economic History.
Her scholarship has focused specifically on migration, labor markets, and inequality in American history. 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-19th and early-20th 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" (PublicAffairs, 2022), was listed among The New Yorker's Best Books of 2022 and Forbes' Best Business Books of 2022, among others.
She has received numerous awards to support her research. She was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2012 and the IZA Young Labor Economist Award in 2019. She was later named a Fellow of the Econometrics Society in 2022 and of the Society of Labor Economists in 2024. She is also a frequently invited speaker: In 2024 and 2025 alone, Boustan gave 11 keynote addresses or named lectures. These related to her most recent book, "Streets of Gold,"about the upward mobility of the children of immigrants in the United States, and her follow-up project on U.S.-Europe comparisons. The capstone of this achievement was giving the Distinguished Lecture at the American Economics Association in January 2026.
During her first year at Yale, Boustan created a new course about American economic history for graduate students and has begun to revitalize the Program in Economic History, including through well-attended seminars featuring visiting faculty and students. Beyond Yale, 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 was also the co-editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economicsfrom 2022 to 2026 and editor of the Journal of Urban Economics from 2017 to 2021.
She received her A.B. from Princeton and her Ph.D. from Harvard.
