Assistant Professor Luca Henkel from Erasmus School of Economics has been appointed as Senior Fellow at the Microsoft AI Economy Institute (AIEI). As part of this appointment, Henkel and his collaborators have been awarded a $94,500 research grant to advance their work on agentic hiring.
Henkel has been selected for this year’s distinguished global cohort of AIEI fellows, bringing his expertise on artificial intelligence, firms, and labour markets to the forefront of global discussions on the economic and social impact of AI. The AI Economy Institute (AIEI) is Microsoft’s premier think tank dedicated to advancing independent research and developing actionable solutions to help societies worldwide adapt to the economic and social transformations driven by artificial intelligence. It convenes leading experts from academia, international organisations, industry, and policy to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming work, education, and productivity.
Agentic hiring
Together with his collaborators Brian Jabarian (Carnegie Mellon University) and Pëllumb Reshidi (Florida State University), Henkel’s work as part of the AIEI fellowship focuses on agentic hiring: the growing use of AI-led systems in recruitment and selection. Firms are increasingly deploying AI to transform hiring from human-first to agentic-first pipelines, yet causal evidence on how these systems affect labor-market outcomes and organizational design remains scarce. The project will use natural field experiments, conducted in collaboration with a major recruiting firm, to study two key questions: how organizational bottlenecks arise when human recruiters evaluate AI interviews, and how AI-led interviews affect discrimination in hiring.
The fellowship and grant build on Henkel’s broader research agenda on the real-world impact of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Earlier this year, he was awarded a $200,000 grant from Schmidt Sciences to conduct field experiments on how AI affects work and organizational decision-making. His research aims to provide evidence on how firms can design, govern, and deploy AI hiring systems responsibly and effectively.
About Luca Henkel
As an assistant professor in the Department of Business Economics (Finance section) at Erasmus School of Economics, Luca Henkel specialises in behavioural economics and household finance. He uses experiments to study how individuals make financial and prosocial decision, as well as how AI-based automation impacts workers and firms. Henkel earned his PhD from the University of Bonn.
- Assistant professor
- More information
For more information, please contact Ronald de Groot, Media & Public Relations Officer at Erasmus School of Economics: rdegroot@ese.eur.nl, mobile +31 6 53 641 846.
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