As I have discussed previously, important research by Stanford economist Raj Chetty and his co-authors has shown that intergenerational income mobility in the United States—a child’s chances of moving up in the income distribution relative to his or her parents—has remained stable over the past half century.1 However, because of the increase in income inequality and stagnant or declining incomes for the least well-off, the consequences of being born to low- versus high-income 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  parents are greater today than in the past. These trends have contributed to a steady decline in “absolute” upward income mobility in the United States, as defined by the share of children who earn more in real terms than their parents. This fraction has fallen from 90 percent to 50 percent over the past half century. Recent work by Chetty and his co-authors has investigated the importance of higher education in achieving upward mobility. They find that many highly qualified lower-income students do not attend selective colleges, while those low- and middle-income students who do—despite facing greater challenges—fare almost as well as affluent students who attend the same colleges. Their research also indicates that some colleges are better engines of upward income mobility than others, and that colleges that offered the largest number of low-income students pathways to upward mobility have become less accessible to them during the 2000s. As a result, highereducation’s contribution to increasing intergenerational mobility has diminished. It is unclear why access has fallen to colleges with relatively high mobility rates.

And, while we are working hard to improve available information, we lack sufficient historical depth to be able to use the past as a guide to estimate future developments. In addition, there is no previous experience of structural changes of this magnitude, which also require a very long-term perspective, and where the presence of non-linearities and irreversible tipping points are likely, conditioning the methodologies to be used. And there is limited research, and accompanying data, that explore how climate risks feed into the financial risks faced by banks. In this context, many supervisory and/or prudential authorities are opting to use stress tests and scenario analysis. 1  As a result, we should accept that efforts to translate climate-related risks into quantifiable financial risks are in their early stages. And we will have to step up our efforts to address these problems and limitations. It’s also crucial that these efforts are coordinated at the global level, given the global dimension of the risks and the potential spillovers that can arise through interconnections between the real and financial sectors. In this regard, in the case of banks, at the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) level we are planning to conduct a “gap analysis” to identify areas in the current Basel Framework where climate-related financial risks may not be adequately addressed or are not captured. This gap analysis will be comprehensive in nature, and will cover regulatory, supervisory and disclosure elements. Building on the analysis, we plan to explore practical solutions to address any identified gaps.