Fields Wins IZA Prize in Labor Economics

Professor Gary Fields, whose research, teaching and outreach revolves around the world’s poorest people, has won the 2014 Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Prize in Labor Economics. The IZA Prize is awarded annually for outstanding academic achievement in the field of labor economics. It is meant to stimulate research to find answers to important labor market policy questions. The IZA Prize Committee expressed that Fields “pioneered economic thinking about labor markets in developing countries by focusing on indicators such as poverty, inequality and income mobility.”

Over the years, Fields’ groundbreaking work has been instrumental in improving the lives of the world’s poorest people. One of the most cited researchers at Cornell, Fields is also influencing global policy through his work with governments and international agencies such as the World Bank. He is the author of the 2012 book, Working Hard, Working Poor: A Global Journey, which illustrates that global poverty is a problem of the quality of employment and not a matter of high unemployment rates.

ILR now has the distinction of being home to three IZA award winners. Fields joins Professor Fran Blau, Cornell’s Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Labor Economics, and Alan Krueger (BSILR ’83), who won as a Princeton University professor.

The IZA is a private independent economic research institute focused on global labor market analysis. The nonprofit organization is based in Bonn, Germany and is supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation.

Fields will receive the IZA prize on January 4, 2015 at the Allied Social Science Associations meeting in Boston and has been invited to lead a scientific event for the IZA-World Bank Employment and Development Conference scheduled for June 4 – 6, 2015 in Bonn.

For more information on this award, visit: www.ilr.cornell.edu/news.