Stephen Burks

Introduction

Stephen Burks, Ph.D., is a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris.

Burks  focuses on two main research areas: experimental and behavioral personnel economics and the economics of the U.S. trucking industry. Much of his empirical research addresses how experimentally identified social, loss, time, and risk preferences affect the way in which labor economics explain the employment relationship. More recently, he has been working on the relationship between the health status of truckers and their crash risk, turnover, productivity, and medical costs.

Burks is affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany, and the Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics at the University of Nottingham, UK. He was a founding member, and chair (2014-17) of the Standing Committee on Trucking Industry Research at the Transportation Research Board. He received the University of Minnesota Morris Faculty Distinguished Research award in 2014, and the research group he leads, the Truckers & Turnover Project, won the Center for Transportation Studies "Robert C. Johns Research Partnership Award" in 2019 for work with a large motor carrier on medical conditions and truck driver safety.