Stephen Burks focuses on two main research areas: the economics of the United States trucking industry and experimental and behavioral personnel economics. It was experiencing the 1980 economic deregulation of the trucking industry as a tractor-trailer driver that led him to retool as an economist after initial study in philosophy. His early empirical research—much of it with truckers—addressed how experimentally identified social, loss, time, and risk preferences affect the way labor economics explains the employment relationship. His later work focused on the relationship between the health status of truckers and their on-the-job outcomes, and on the structure of the truck driver labor market.
Burks is affiliated with the Luxembourg Institute of Social and Economic Research, where research fellows of the Institute for Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany, were transferred in 2026, and the Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. He was a founding member and a past chair (2014–2017) of one of the former Transportation Research Board standing technical committees.
Burks received the University of Minnesota Morris Faculty Distinguished Research award in 2014, and the Morris research team he helped found and that he continues to co-lead (as a volunteer) won the 2019 Robert C. Johns Research Partnership Award for collaborative work on trucker medical conditions and safety performance. During 2022–2024 he served on the National Academies Transportation Research Board Consensus Studies Division committee reviewing how long-distance truck driver wages and working conditions affect their safety and retention.
Burks holds a BA in philosophy from Reed College, an MA in philosophy from Indiana University, and a PhD in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.