The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Anders Humlum (University of Chicago) for this session.
Anders Humlum is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Fujimori/Mou Faculty Scholar at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. His research studies how artificial intelligence and automation affect labor markets, with a particular focus on technology adoption, re-skilling policies, and workers’ ability to adapt to economic change.
Event Topic:
Integrators: The Firm Boundaries of Capital-Skill Complementarity
New machinery has long been argued to raise the relative demand for skilled labor — yet modern firm-level evidence finds no such shift for investing firms. We resolve this puzzle by showing that the skills most complementary to new machinery are most often not hired in-house. Linking Belgian firm-level data on capital investments, buyer-supplier transactions, and worker skills, we show that the skill bias of new machinery arises entirely from external suppliers. Following machinery investment spikes, firms’ purchases from external suppliers raise total demand for high-STEM workers by 47% — three times the 8-17% rise for other skill groups — while in-house employment grows evenly, contributing less than 5%. The external skill bias comes first from machine integrators and later from complementary services, and is stronger for smaller firms, lumpier investments, and capital undergoing rapid technological change — consistent with fixed and adjustment costs of hiring technology-complementary skills. Our findings reveal that firm boundaries are central to both measuring capital-skill complementarity and understanding technology adoption.
Event Details:
Date: 16 June 2026
Time: 14:00–15:15
Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.
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