Alissa Kleinnijenhuis

Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis (born 27 November 1991) is a Dutch economist. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, at Cornell University. Her research addresses salient questions in finance, particularly in climate finance.

She is best known for her work on The Great Carbon Arbitrage and she also co-edited the book Handbook of Financial Stress Testing (2022), which Stanford economist Darrell Duffie described as a definitive compendium of a decade of post-Great Financial Crisis stress testing, summarizing state of the art and offering ways forward. The book is prefaced by Timothy Geithner and endorsed by Ben Bernanke and Christine Lagarde, among other economists. It received contributions from specialists on the topic of stress testing, including Robert F. Engle and Lawrence Summers.

Early life and education
Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis was born in The Netherlands into a family of academics. Her father, Jan Kleinnijenhuis, is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Communication Science, at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Her mother, Anne Magda Smilde, studied and taught Spanish and Psychology, and is an author of books on Dutch history in Indonesia. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Theology at the Vrije Universiteit. In her free time with her father, she has worked on a proof of the Collatz Conjecture, which is referred to as one of the "million-bucks problems" in mathematics. Her brother Kas Kleinnijenhuis is an entrepreneur.

Kleinnijenhuis earned a B.S. from Utrecht University in Economics and Mathematics (cum laude) in 2013, an M.Sc. in Mathematics and Finance from Imperial College London in 2014, and a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in Mathematics from the University of Oxford (in the Mathematical and Computational Finance Group) in 2020.

She conducted research on system-wide stress testing at the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and Morgan Stanley.

Career
Following her doctoral thesis work at the University of Oxford, Kleinnijenhuis joined the MIT Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2019. In 2020, she joined Stanford University, where she taught a novel course in Climate Finance, and then joined the finance department of Imperial College London in 2023. Since Summer 2023, she has been a Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, at Cornell University.

Kleinnijenhuis is a Non-Resident Fellow at Bruegel, a European think tank specializing in economics.

In the study The Great Carbon Arbitrage, Kleinnijenhuis and co-authors give the first empirical quantification of the global costs and benefits of phasing out coal, broken down at the country level. They find that a large net social gain (on the order of trillions) can be reaped from replacing coal with renewable technologies. They argue that in a world of incomplete carbon taxation (widely considered to be the first-best policy for pricing carbon externalities), there is a salient complementary role for climate finance. A problem with climate finance is that it has yet to deliver scale. Their study makes a novel economic case for climate finance and offers a new way to make climate finance incentive-compatible for its key stakeholders (governments, investors, and coal communities), so it can, driven by stakeholders pursuing their economic interests, timely achieve scale. Scale is required to solve the trillion-dollar climate problem.