Essec Business School

A major congratulations to Lutz Sager, Assistant Professor of Economics at ESSEC, who was recently awarded a prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), amounting to €1.4M over five years!

The 2026 edition selected 421 laureates out of 4807 total applications. Lutz is among the 38 French laureates, and among 11 French laureates in the Social Sciences and Humanities domain. Dr. Sager is the second ESSEC professor to receive an ERC grant, following Dr. Pierre Jacob’s success in 2024. His project, "LEGEND: A New Framework for Local Economic Growth Without Environmental Destruction", will explore a critical question: can economic growth and sustainability truly coexist? 

Dr. Sager, can you explain the project’s main hypotheses and methodology? 

To evaluate this question, LEGEND will pioneer local-level green growth indicators for European regions. By zooming in on European regions as “local laboratories”, we hope to better understand what drives green growth performance. Since previous research mainly focused on national averages, we will be able to pay careful attention to local economic contexts and uncover previously unknown patterns of economy-environment interactions. Our approach is interdisciplinary, as we will combine economic and environmental data, environmental accounting techniques, and statistical policy evaluation. By integrating environmental degradation, pollution spillovers, and trade flows into a single economic framework, the project will create the first subnational empirical infrastructure to analyze green growth indicators at this level of detail.

What led you to this research stream? 

• Economic growth has contributed to substantial improvements of living standards and generally made people happier and healthier. This has often come at a cost, including  serious environmental damage from climate change, biodiversity loss, and air and water pollution. Whether economic growth can be achieved without environmental destruction is a fundamental question of sustainability. The topic  remains contested, with no clear consensus on whether “green growth” can be achieved and, if so, how. Since my research has focused a lot on local areas–such as the effects of Low Emission Zones in German cities or air quality regulation in US counties–I wanted to adopt this  local perspective to the study of green growth. 

What will your first steps on the project look like? 

• The first phase of the project is all about data. We need to collect detailed data on the economic and environmental performance of EU regions, which will allow us to construct our green growth indices. That will be the foundation for the later stages of the project, in which we will look for successful cases of local green growth and study the underlying drivers. To help me deal with these large amounts of data from many different sources, a key first step will be to recruit the project team. 

Who are you working with on this project? 

• Thanks to the generous funding from the European Research Council, I will recruit a team of researchers to work with me on this project. The team will include multiple postdoctoral researchers, a PhD student, and a large number of research assistants. They will bring skills and expertise to complement my own, including working with satellite data, physical pollution transport models, and conducting qualitative interviews. We will also seek collaborations with researchers at other leading institutions, building on my prior networks. I am confident that the LEGEND team will further contribute to ESSEC’s leadership in the sustainability domain.

About Lutz Sager

Lutz Sager joined ESSEC in 2024. He is an environmental economist who studies the costs of and solutions to climate change and air pollution. His work has been published in leading academic journals, featured in the press (Forbes, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times), and referenced by governments and international organizations. He was recently awarded the 2026 Humanities and Social Sciences Chair from the Ile-de-France region for a project on the impact of pedestrian policies in Paris. 

About the European Research Council 

The ERC funds cutting-edge research across the European Union. Every year, the ERC awards highly competitive grants to researchers in all fields of science and technology, categorized by seniority according to the date on which they received their PhD (Starting, Consolidator, and Advanced Grants). The Starting Grants target early-career researchers with fewer than 10 years of experience following their PhD and who show significant potential for groundbreaking research.