8 For evidence of a flattening of the slope of the Phillips curve in the United States and abroad, see, among others, Simon, Matheson, and Sandri (2013); Blanchard, Cerutti, and Summers (2015); and Pfajfar and Roberts (2018). The difficulties in assessing shortfalls from maximum employment using measures of the unemployment rate has motivated researchers to explore alternative approaches.
See Abraham, Haltiwanger, and Rendell (2020) for an approach based on the job search and matching framework. See also the staff discussion of various concepts of unemployment rate benchmarks by Crump, Nekarda, and Petrosky-Nadeau (2020), which was prepared as background materials for this review.