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.

Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis
Kleinnijenhuis in 2022
Born27 November 1991
NationalityDutch
Known forThe Great Carbon Arbitrage[1]
Academic background
Alma materImperial College London (M.Sc.), University of Oxford (D.Phil./Ph.D.)
Doctoral advisorDoyne Farmer
Other advisorsCharles Goodhart, Patrick Bolton
Academic work
DisciplineFinance, Economics
Sub-disciplineClimate Finance, Financial Stability
InstitutionsCornell University, Imperial College London, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Websitewww.alissakleinnijenhuis.com

She is best known for her work on The Great Carbon Arbitrage.[1] In this study, 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.[2][3][4][5][6] They find that a large net social gain (on the order of trillions) can be reaped from replacing coal with renewable technologies.[2][3][4][5] 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.[2] 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.[2][3][4][7] Scale is required to solve the trillion-dollar climate problem.[8]

She 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,[9] 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 edit

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.[10] Her mother, Anne Magda Smilde, studied and taught Spanish and Psychology, and is an author of books on Dutch history in Indonesia.[11] She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Theology at the Vrije Universiteit.[12] In her free time with her father, she has worked on a proof of the Collatz Conjecture,[13] which is referred to as one of the "million-bucks problems" in mathematics.[14] Her brother Kas Kleinnijenhuis is an entrepreneur.[citation needed]

Kleinnijenhuis earned a B.S. from Utrecht University in Economics and Mathematics (cum laude) in 2013, an M.Sc. in Mathematics and Finance from the 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.[15]

She conducted research on system-wide stress testing at the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and Morgan Stanley.[16]

Career edit

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.[17] In 2020, she joined Stanford University,[18] where she taught a novel course in Climate Finance,[19] and then joined the finance department of Imperial College London in 2023.[20] 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.[21]

Publications edit

Notable articles edit

Author Year Title Publisher Notes
Adrian, T., Bolton, P. & Kleinnijenhuis, A.M. 2022 The Great Carbon Arbitrage International Monetary Fund[1] (1) Offers the first empirical quantification of national costs and benefits of phasing out coal and replacing it with renewables. (2) Establishes a novel economic foundation for climate finance.

Notable books edit

Author Year Title Publisher Notes
Farmer, J.D., Kleinnijenhuis, A.M., Schuermann, T. & Wetzer, T. 2022 Handbook of Financial Stress Testing Cambridge University Press[22] Definitive compendium on a decade of financial stress testing following the 2007-2008 financial crisis

References edit

  1. ^ a b c "The Great Carbon Arbitrage". IMF.
  2. ^ a b c d IFC-IEA (21 June 2023). Scaling up Private Finance for Clean Energy in Emerging and Developing Economies (PDF). International Energy Agency & International Finance Corporation.
  3. ^ a b c Tett, Gillian (13 June 2022). "Killing coal: a new way to get investors involved". Financial Times.
  4. ^ a b c "Financing the Managed Phaseout of Coal-Fired Power Plants in Asia Pacific" (PDF). Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. June 2023.
  5. ^ a b Straver, Frank (1 September 2022). "Klimaatwinst. Wie plukt de vruchten van de groene transitie?". Trouw.
  6. ^ Beunderman, Mark (15 July 2022). "Klimaatbeleid duur? Het levert tienduizenden miljarden op, zegt het IMF". NRC Handelsblad.
  7. ^ Prasad, Ananthakrishnan (27 July 2022). "Mobilizing Private Climate Financing in Emerging Market and Developing Economies". IMF ELibrary.
  8. ^ Nordhaus, William (10 April 2020). "The Climate Club: How to Fix a Failing Global Effort". Foreign Affairs.
  9. ^ Kleinnijenhuis, Alissa (2022). Farmer, J. Doyne; Kleinnijenhuis, Alissa M.; Schuermann, Til; Wetzer, Thom (eds.). Handbook of Financial Stress Testing. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108903011. ISBN 9781108903011. S2CID 247136328.
  10. ^ Kleinnijenhuis, Jan. "Prof. Dr. Jan Kleinnijenhuis". prof. dr. Jan Kleinnijenhuis. Vrije Universiteit.
  11. ^ Smilde, Anne Magda (2010). "Adieu". Google Books.
  12. ^ Smilde, Anne Magda. "Trajecta Conferentie 2022". Vrije Universiteit.
  13. ^ Kleinnijenhuis, Jan (17 January 2021). "The Collatz tree as a Hilbert hotel: a proof of the 3x + 1 conjecture". arXiv:2008.13643 [math.GM].
  14. ^ http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/0papers/million.buck.problems.mi.pdf
  15. ^ Kleinnijenhuis, Alissa (2020). System-Wide Stress Testing & Systemic Risk. Oxford University Research Archive (Thesis).
  16. ^ Kleinnijenhuis, Alissa (15 May 2020). "Foundations of System-Wide Stress Testing with Heterogeneous Agents" (PDF). Bank of England, Staff Working Paper. No. 861. {{cite journal}}: |volume= has extra text (help)
  17. ^ Kleinnijenhuis, Alissa (7 July 2020). "Usable Bank Capital". MIT Sloan School of Management.
  18. ^ Kleinnijenhuis, Alissa (July 2020). "The Great Carbon Arbitrage: Going short on coal and long on renewables". Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).
  19. ^ Kleinnijenhuis, Alissa. "Bulletin Explore Courses". Stanford University.
  20. ^ WFA. "Western Finance Association Conference Program 2023" (PDF). Western Finance Association.
  21. ^ "Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis". Bruegel | The Brussels-based economic think tank. March 24, 2023.
  22. ^ Farmer, J. Doyne; Kleinnijenhuis, Alissa M.; Schuermann, Til; Wetzer, Thom, eds. (August 8, 2022). Handbook of Financial Stress Testing. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108903011. ISBN 9781108903011. S2CID 247136328.