Alissa Kleinnijenhuis

Biography

Alissa M. Kleinnijenhuis is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University and is affiliated with the Imperial College Business School's Finance Department. Alissa is also 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), an 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, she started teaching the inaugural Climate Finance course at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. In October 2023, she launched 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. Alissa is the founding editor of the Handbook of Financial Stress Testing (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which features contributions by leading scholars, public sector officials, and practitioners on the topic of stress testing, and includes a preface by Timothy Geithner and endorsements by Ben Bernanke and Christine Lagarde. 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 has organised the Young Scholars’ Webinar on Climate Finance and Economics (supported by the E-Axis Forum).

Alissa's 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.

Alissa 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 Computational Finance from the University of Oxford (Mathematical Institute). 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 has worked for Morgan Stanley and Allianz Global Investors.