Codirectors

Leah Boustan is a professor of economics at Princeton University. Her research focuses on issues at the intersection of labor economics and economic history, particularly the consequences of the Great Black Migration after WWII. She has been an NBER affiliate since 2007.

William Collins is the Terence E. Adderly Jr. Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on 20th century labor markets and cities, including migration, racial disparities, and urban renewal. He has been an NBER affiliate since 1999.
Featured Program Content

When nations experience rapid economic modernization, traditional family values can clash with new social realities and result in sharply declining birth rates...

US tariff policy reduced labor productivity in the American manufacturing sector during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Alexander Klein...

Local land use and state and federal environmental regulations proliferated in the early 1970s. About this time, US residential construction productivity began...