Alissa Kleinnijenhuis

Biography

Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis is a visiting assistant professor of finance at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and is affiliated with the finance department at the Imperial College Business School of Imperial College London.

Kleinnijenhuis is a 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 Center for Sustainability. She taught a new, and first, course at Stanford University on climate finance. In fall 2023, she taught the inaugural Climate Finance course at the Johnson School.

Kleinnijenhuis 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. She is the founding editor of the Handbook of Financial Stress Testing (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is also a founding editor of Elements in Climate Finance, a novel publishing format of Cambridge University Press, combining features of books and journals. Since 2023, she's organized Young Scholars' Webinar on Climate Finance and Economics (supported by the E-Axis Forum).

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.

Kleinnijenhuis holds a BS in economics and mathematics (cum laude) from Utrecht University, an MSc in mathematics and finance from the Imperial College London, and a DPhil in mathematical and computational finance from the University of Oxford. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy, and a research scholar at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research 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.

Recent Courses

• AEM 6940 - Graduate Special Topics in Applied Economics and Management
• AEM 4940 - Undergraduate Special Topics in Applied Economics and Management

Academic Degrees

• PhD University of Oxford, 2020
• MS Imperial College London, 2014
• BA University College Utrecht, 2013