Gary S. Fields is the John P. Windmuller Professor of International and Comparative Labor and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He has been an Ivy League teacher and professor for more than forty years. He teaches and conducts research in labour economics, development economics, and public policy in the university-wide department of economics, the ILR School, and the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs.
Fields has published more than 150 books and articles. His books include topics such as poverty, inequality, and development: Retirement, Pensions, and Social Security (with Olivia Mitchell), Distribution and Development: A New Look at the Developing World; Pathways out of Poverty (with Guy Pfeffermann), Bottom-Line Management, and Working Hard, Working Poor. In 2014 Fields received the IZA Prize in labour economics, the top award in the field.
He has held visiting professorships at the University of Nairobi (Kenya), Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia), University of Oxford (UK), University of Warwick (UK), London School of Economics (UK), the Paris School of Economics (France), Koç University (Turkey), and the Centre for Development Studies (India). Fields' research interests include economic development, global economy, international and comparative workplace studies, labour economics and labour market models, poverty and inequality, income mobility, wage differentials and inequality, leadership.
Professor Fields is involved in the UNU-WIDER project Transforming informal work and livelihoods, where he is managing and co-ordinating the overall implementation of the project.
Most workers in developing countries work in the informal labour market Lower-tier informal work leads to a dead end in the countries in this study, with little opportunity to move up the job ladder While those in upper-tier informal work are the...
The most important determinant of households’ livelihoods is how much they earn for their labour. People in informal work are more likely to be low earners, to live in poverty, and to make fewer transitions into the higher-paying work statuses. The...
This paper has two purposes. The first is to define clearly different social mobility concepts and components. The second is to embed these concepts and components into a larger context of social mobility research. The core of the paper develops six...
Some questions have been present since the very first days of development economics but have gained increased attention in recent years: Has economic growth resulted in gains in standards of living and reductions in poverty via improved labor market...
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality
Part of Book Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America
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