Posted Wage Cyclicality: Evidence from High-Quality Vacancy Data

We estimate high real wage cyclicality using over a decade of online job ads. Our unique, high-quality data—featuring reliable wage rates, firm identifiers, job titles, hiring standards, vacancy counts, and applicant demographics— provides an accurate measure of firms’ marginal labor cost due to its demand-side and ex ante nature and leads to dependable estimates. Crucially, omitting countercyclical hiring standards leads to underestimating real wage procyclicality. A search and matching model with endogenous hiring standards rationalizes these findings, showing how highquality data is crucial for understanding labor market dynamics.