Gary Fields is the John P. Windmuller Professor of International and Comparative Labor Emeritus and Professor of Economics Emeritus at Cornell University, a Research Fellow at the IZA-Institute for Labor Economics, and a UNU-WIDER Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow. He is the 2014 winner of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, the top world-wide award in the field. He has been an Ivy League teacher and professor for more than fifty years, first at Yale University and then at Cornell University.

At Cornell, he taught and conducted research in labor economics and development economics in the Department of Economics and the ILR School. He chaired ILR's Department of Labor Economics three times and chaired ILR's Department of International and Comparative Labor for eighteen years. He received perfect teacher ratings in several Cornell University courses (5.0/5.0), has an 88% 5.0 rating on ratemyprofessors.com, and is a three-time recipient of the General Mills Foundation Award for Exemplary Graduate Teaching.

Fields has published close to 200 books and articles. His books have been published by the Cambridge University Press, MIT Press (two books), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, International Labor Organization, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Stanford University Press, Springer (two books), and Oxford University Press (four books). His articles have appeared in such professional journals as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Econometrica, Economica, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Inequality,  Journal of Public Economics, and the International Economic Review. His books have been praised by Nobel Prize winners including Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof, and Esther Duflo.

Fields is also active in public service and consulting. He is the recipient of numerous grants and contracts from the World Bank, UNU-WIDER, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, International Labor Organization, and the United Nations, among others. He served as a consultant to private companies and the governments of several countries.

Gary Fields and his wife, Vivian, have lived overseas for many years. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Nairobi (Kenya), Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia), Oxford University (England), University of Warwick (England), London School of Economics (England), the Paris School of Economics, previously known as the Département et Laboratoire d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée (France), Koç University (Turkey), the Centre for Development Studies (India), the Central Institute for Economic Management (Vietnam), the University of Sydney (Australia), and the European University Institute (Italy). They look forward to further travels in retirement.