ENSAE

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About the partnership

Mirova Research Center partners with the chair dedicated to impact investing at ENSAE Paris — the first chair supported by the ENSAE-ENSAI Foundation. Anchored in the work of CREST, ENSAE’s internationally recognised research centre in economics, statistics, finance and sociology, the chair addresses a consequential open question in sustainable finance: how to properly assess and foster real-world impact generation in listed-asset strategies.
The initiative goes beyond the study of strategy performance and risk pricing. It contributes to theoretical and empirical knowledge through a scientific programme structured around two axes:
• Impact investing with an ambition of additionality — including shareholder engagement strategies and the net-zero alignment of investors.
• Impact investing beyond climate — reconciling complementary environmental impact objectives, and bridging the gap between environmental and social imperatives.
The programme draws on a broad interdisciplinary team with expertise spanning finance, economics, environmental science, and sociology.

About ENSAE

As part of the GENES group and a member of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris — a world-class science and technology institute comprising six prestigious French engineering schools — ENSAE Paris is distinguished by the rigour of its faculty and the quality of its research. Its research centre, CREST, is internationally recognised for innovative work at the intersection of economics, statistics, finance, insurance, and sociology.

Research projects

Critical Raw Materials risk and asset pricing — Lishu Zhang

The green transition depends on critical raw materials (CRMs) that are geographically concentrated, largely non-substitutable, and increasingly subject to geopolitical restrictions. This project develops the first firm-level, supply-chain-traced measure of CRM exposure, leveraging AI tools to reconstruct large-scale production networks — and examines whether this risk is reflected in asset prices.

Blended finance for biodiversity in agriculture — Davide Stocco

Farmland biodiversity continues to decline across Europe despite decades of EU direct payments, with little evidence that current subsidy structures alter the practices driving that decline. This project models a blended finance instrument — a subsidised lending rate with biodiversity conditionality — and benchmarks its effectiveness against existing policy tools at equal budget.

Empirical net-zero and impact stock portfolio construction — Jérôme Allier

This project examines whether portfolio optimisation can simultaneously achieve net-zero alignment and real-economy climate impact, and at what cost relative to a standard benchmark. It combines forward-looking, machine-learning-based emissions forecasting with two complementary impact metrics, comparing performance across three decarbonisation pathways.

Sustainable indices, firm behaviour, and coordinated shareholder engagement — Omar Khattab

Can the design of sustainable indices create meaningful incentives for firms to improve their environmental practices? This project analyses the equilibrium conditions under which index inclusion thresholds drive corporate abatement decisions, and extends into a parallel investigation of how investor coordination can amplify firms’ decarbonisation incentives beyond capital-allocation effects alone.

Market power, business cycles, and the green transition — Nina Stizi

This project explores how the distribution of market power across firms shapes the cyclical dynamics of the green transition. Using a DSGE framework in which green and brown sectors compete through quality ladders, it examines how markup structures affect firms’ incentives to innovate in favour of low-carbon technologies.

Private equity and social welfare in the childcare sector — Eugenio Parigi

Drawing on a large administrative panel covering two decades of ownership, financial, and employment data in France, this project studies the expansion of private equity into a heavily subsidised social sector — and its effects on financial performance, employment, and market structure. The research contributes

CIFRE Doctoral Research at MRC

As part of its partnership with ENSAE Paris, the MRC hosts a CIFRE doctoral researcher, Carolina Moura, working in collaboration with CREST, under the academic supervision of Professor Olivier David Zerbib.
Running from September 2025 to August 2028, this three-year research programme will produce three quantitative academic papers on impact investing in listed assets. The CIFRE framework — which embeds doctoral research within a company — reflects MRC’s commitment to producing rigorous academic work that is directly informed by the realities and demands of responsible investment practice.

Papers :

  • The biodiversity premium (Ecological Economic)
  • Can investors curb greenwashing ?
  • Critical Raw Material Risk in Asset Pricing, Lishu

We are confident that the work conducted with the Impact Investing Chair at ENSAE will provide a robust theoretical framework and empirical analysses on which investors can rely to enhance their coordination capacity in the context of the shareholder engagement for the transition. The second axis of the program should allow for a better understanding of the financial impact of biodiversity loss on portfolios and the reconciliation of ecological transition objectives with those of social justice.

Oliver David-Zerbib

Researcher at Crest and Assistant professor in Sustainable Finance at ENSAé Paris

As part of the partnership between SIRI and MRC, we will be supporting academic research that is practice relevant, sharing the data and results derived from it, and promoting them to all our stakeholders to contribute to the rapid advancement of the implementation of new best practices in blended and support its growth.

Manuel Coeslier

Head of Mirova Research Center

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