ESSEC’s Lutz Sager Awarded €1.4M European Research Council Starting Grant for Groundbreaking Research on Green Growth

Cergy, September 3rd, 2026 – Lutz Sager, Assistant Professor of Economics at ESSEC, has been 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 Consolidator Grant in 2024. His project, "LEGEND: A New Framework for Local Economic Growth Without Environmental Destruction", will pioneer local-level green growth indicators, addressing a critical gap in sustainability science.

The ERC is a public body that 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.

While economic development has improved human well-being and material living standards, it has also led to widespread environmental damage and destruction. LEGEND will evaluate a key unanswered question: whether economic growth and sustainability can truly coexist. A novel characteristic of the project will be its use of European regions as “local laboratories” rather than simply analyzing national averages, generating new, valuable data and allowing for a more nuanced picture to emerge. The project will take an interdisciplinary approach, blending economic and environmental data, environmental accounting, and policy evaluation. In doing so, it will provide the first green growth assessment of European economies at the local level. By integrating environmental degradation, pollution spillovers, and trade flows into economic frameworks, the project will create the first subnational empirical infrastructure to analyze green growth indicators.

Lutz Sager

Dr. Sager noted, "Receiving the ERC grant is a tremendous honor. This support will allow us to push the boundaries of environmental economics and provide policymakers with the tools they need to make data-driven decisions."

“We are incredibly proud that Lutz Sager has been selected for this prestigious European grant, which will undoubtedly have an impact in multiple domains. At ESSEC, we are committed to fostering an environment that supports exceptional researchers such as Lutz and his team, enabling them to make transformative contributions to their fields," said Ha Hoang, Associate Dean for Research at ESSEC.

Julia Smith, International Media Relations Officer - 01 34 43 98 25 – smith@essec.edu

Marie Caroline Saro, External Communications Manager - 06 99 09 82 25 – saro@essec.edu

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.

The ERC funding will allow Dr. Sager to recruit doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers and foster French and international partnerships. With its focus on sustainability and economic development, Dr. Sager’s project is perfectly aligned with ESSEC’s Transcend strategy and the work of the ESSEC Together Institute for Sustainability and Social Change.

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