Stephen Burks is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Management at the University of Minnesota Morris (UMN Morris), where he has been since 1999. His two main research areas are experimental and behavioral personnel economics, and the economics of the U.S. trucking industry. It was experiencing the 1980 deregulation of the industry as a tractor-trailer driver that convinced him to return to grad school for doctoral work in economics at UMass-Amherst. Burks discovered experimental and behavioral economics while analyzing the effects of deregulation on the labor market for truck drivers. His early empirical research addressed how experimentally identified social, loss, time, and risk preferences affect the way in which labor economics explains the employment relationship. More recently he has been working on the relationship between the health status of truckers and their accident risk, turnover, productivity, and medical costs, along with a renewed look at the structure and dynamics of the US labor market for truck drivers. He is affiliated with the University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies, and the Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx), University of Nottingham, UK. He was a founding member and a past Chair of the standing technical Committee on Trucking Industry Research (AT060) at the Transportation Research Board (an arm of the National Academies of the U.S.; now folded into AT014 in the 2025 committee reorganization). His work has been published in Sleep, Management Science, the Review of Economic Studies, Experimental Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA), the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Accident Analysis and Prevention, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, among other places. Burks received the UMN Morris Faculty Distinguished Research award in 2014, and the UMN Morris Truckers & Turnover Project, which he leads, received the UMN Center for Transportation Studies "Robert C. Johns Research Partnership Award," for collaborative work on sleep apnea among truckers, in 2019. He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in March 2005.