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ABSTRACT:

We measure the gains from phasing out coal as the social cost of carbon times the quantity of avoided emissions. By comparing the present value of avoided carbon emissions to the present value of the costs of ending coal plus the costs of replacing it with renewable energy, our baseline estimate is that the world could realize a net total gain of 77.89 trillion US dollars. This represents around 1.19% of current world GDP every year until 2100. We argue that policies and institutions should be construed to reap these large net benefits.


ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis is a Research Scholar at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) at Stanford University. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) at the Oxford Martin School of the University of Oxford. Alissa is a Co-PI of a Market Ecology & Financial Stability Grant, supervising four PhD students, and Co-Founder of the Climate Stress Testing and Scenarios Project. She is teaching a novel course at Stanford University in Fall 2021 on Climate Finance.

Kleinnijenhuis’ research examines how finance can advance the public good, focusing on how we can design more resilient financial systems and avert a climate crisis. Her two focal areas of research are financial crises and climate finance, linked by their emphasis on addressing externalities emerging from too-big-to-fail (or too-many-to-fail) financial institutions and climate change. Subtopics of special relevance in her studies are financial regulation, models of contagion and systemic risk, financial stress testing, financial intermediation, market microstructure, monetary policy, asset pricing, and climate financial risks and opportunities.

Dr. Kleinnijenhuis holds a BS from Utrecht University in Economics and Mathematics (cum laude), a MSc in Mathematics and Finance from the Imperial College London, and a DPhil (PhD) 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 Centre for Finance and Policy (GCFP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Yale University and the University of California Santa Barbara, and has conducted research at Morgan Stanley and Allianz Global Investors.

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