Liberal Arts and Sciences
Phillips Lab
Led by Michelle Phillips · Economics
What we study
The Phillips Lab uses economic data analysis. Recent student projects use regression on cross-country data to study links between heat waves and human trafficking, and between immigration and the informal economy; papers cover efficiency and soil carbon.
What working here is like
- Computational
- Surveys & interviews
- No organisms (data only)
- Coding helps
- Projects
- 2
- Papers
- 4
Current projects
The Informal Economy: Who's Fueling it?
This study looks at how immigrant populations relate to the informal economy, using data from 81 countries between 2003 and 2013. It examines how factors like Human Development Index and Governance Indicators affect the size of the informal sector.
From the Spring 2025 UF Undergraduate Research Symposium · abstract book, p. 478
Project Exploring the Relationship Between Climate Change and Human Trafficking
The lab examined how heat waves affect human trafficking by analyzing data from 98 countries between 2013 and 2020 with ordinary least squares regression, controlling for population, GDP, unemployment, government effectiveness, and refugees. The student performed the statistical analysis and interpreted the results.
From the Spring 2025 UF Undergraduate Research Symposium · abstract book, p. 302
Summaries are written by AI in plain language from public symposium abstracts and may be imperfect.
Recent papers, explained
- Technical efficiency of the urban gas industry in china
2023 · Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Tests how efficiently China uses natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas in 24 provinces from 2006 to 2015.
- Holistic aboveground ecological productivity efficiency modeling using data envelopment analysis in the southeastern U.S
2022 · The Science of The Total Environment
Show 2 more papersShow fewer
- Sensitivity assessment of metafrontier data envelopment analysis for soil carbon sequestration efficiency
2021 · Ecological Indicators
Checks how different methods affect soil carbon efficiency scores in three land types.
- Emergence of the Pedo-Econometric Approach
2021 · Frontiers in Soil Science
Combines pedometrics and econometrics to create tools for smart soil management decisions.
Plain-language summaries are AI-written and reviewed by us; check the paper for details.
How to reach out
Michelle Phillips hasn't set up this page yet. Their UF Scholars profile lists their publications.