Independent Economics Researcher

Cole Phillips is an independent economic researcher based in Coventry, England. His work focuses on labor economics, political economy, industrial organization, and how institutional forces shape market outcomes in unseen ways. He is the author of two working papers published under his independent research series, all of which are publicly available to download.

His first working paper; Tariff Shocks and FUDflation: Testing the Disconnect Between Firm Costs and Consumer Prices, introduced the term FUDflation and presented a behavioral framework for understanding expectation-driven inflation. This was presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Economic Scholars Conference in April 2025.

His second working paper; Concentration at the Top: Labor Access and Agricultural Production in the United States, examines how H-2A employer concentration of the temporary agricultural visa program relates to patterns of agricultural production as well as wages across 49 U.S. states using original labor and commodity concentration ratios, as well as offering the first compiled state-by-state H-2A data atlas. This paper was presented at the Midwest Institutes Conference at Ball State University in May of 2026.

In September 2026 he began a MSc in Economics program at the University of Warwick.