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Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University and is affiliated with the Imperial College Business School Finance Department of Imperial College London. Dr. Kleinnijenhuis is Research Associate at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) at the Oxford Martin School of the University of Oxford, a Non-Resident Fellow at Bruegel (an EU think tank specializing in economics), a RPN Member of Sustainable Finance at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and a Faculty Fellow of the Cornell Atkinson Centre for Sustainability.

She taught the first course at Stanford University on Climate Finance. In Fall 2023 and Spring 2024, she teaches the inaugural Climate Finance course at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, at Cornell University. She founded and co-hosts a novel podcast series, VoxTalks Climate Finance, as part of the highly regarded VoxTalks of CEPR, which seeks to play a formative role in covering the debates at the frontiers of the field that will shape the future of finance when it comes to climate.

Alissa actively collaborates with and advises governments, central banks, corporations, think tanks, and international institutions – including the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund, the African Development Bank, and Fidelity Investments.

Kleinnijenhuis’ research examines how finance can advance the public good, focusing on leveraging the financial sector for a climate change solution. Her research in her primary area of focus, climate finance, examines how financial incentives can be aligned with limiting climate risks and financing the transition to a carbon-neutral and sustainable economy. Her research is all about making the triangular sectors of finance – the public, private, and academic sectors – work for the green transition. Her second area of expertise concerns financial stability, financial crises, financial stress testing, and financial regulation. Her third area of expertise is asset pricing and mathematical finance; she has also taught courses in these areas at the University of Oxford.

Her recent major work in climate finance, entitled The Great Carbon Arbitrage (see summary), conducts an empirical global study of the costs and benefits of phasing out coal and replacing this with renewables. It offers, as far as we are aware, the first country-level analysis of the net benefits of phasing out coal — using a granular data set of coal production and emissions at the asset level. The paper makes the economic case for climate finance at scale, showing how climate finance could be made in the incentives of the key stakeholders involved (governments, coal communities, and investors). Indeed, to solve a trillion-dollar climate problem, we need a trillion-dollar solution. Getting to scale requires a robust incentive structure. The key idea proposed is to form “blended conditional climate finance deals,” that can cumulatively add up to a global deal to end coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. The work has been covered by major news outlets around the world, including the Financial Times, Trouw (front page), Trouw (big read), NRC (big read), IMF Market Insights, Insights ESG, Axios, Tagespiegel, Grist, and Business Traffic; and has received >50 invitations in less than a year, from highly regarded academic, public, and private institutions, including from multilateral development banks, central banks, asset managers, and academic conferences.

Dr. Kleinnijenhuis holds a BS from Utrecht University in Economics and Mathematics (cum laude), an MSc in Mathematics and Finance from the Imperial College London, and a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in Mathematical and Computional Finance from the University of Oxford (Mathematics Department). She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Golub Centre for Finance and Policy (GCFP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Research Scholar at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) at Stanford University. She held a Visiting Scholar position at Yale University and the University of California Santa Barbara, and worked for Morgan Stanley and Allianz Global Investors.