Gary Fields is the John P. Windmuller Professor of International and Comparative Labor and Professor of Economics. His work focuses on Labor Economics, Development Economics, and Public Economics. He is especially interested in the cases of Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela. Fields is the 2014 winner of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, the top worldwide award in the field.

After receiving a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan, he became an assistant professor at Yale University at age 25 and an associate professor at age 29. Two years later, he took up a tenured professorship at Cornell University. At Cornell, he teaches and conducts research in labor economics and development economics in the Department of Economics and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He has chaired ILR's Department of Labor Economics three times and chaired ILR's Department of International and Comparative Labor for eighteen years.

Fields has published more than 150 books and articles. His books include Poverty, Inequality, and Development (Cambridge University Press), Retirement, Pensions, and Social Security (with Olivia Mitchell - MIT Press), and Working Hard, Working Poor (Oxford University Press). His articles have appeared in such professional journals as the American Economic Review,  Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Econometrica, Economica, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Journal of Economic Inequality.