Professor Joan Costa-Font (he/him) is a Professor of Health Economics, the team leader of the Ageing and Health Incentives Lab (AHIL), and a faculty associate of the International Inequalities Institute at LSE. He is a network research fellow at CESifo (since 2008) and IZA (since 2017) with a special interest in behavioural and political economy aspects of health and ageing, and public policy. He has taught at the University of Barcelona, Universita Cattolica, and Paris Dauphine, and has held visiting research positions at the University of Munich (2008), Oxford University (2009), Boston College (2013) , UCL (2016), and Sciences Po (2023).
Earlier in his career, Joan earned a Harkness Fellowship (2012) at Harvard University and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2001) at LSE. He has been the principal investigator in several research projects and served as a consultant for a number of international (the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Health Organization, Public Health England, and the European Commission) and national (the (Cabinet Office, NIHR, Public Health England, and the House of Lords) organizations. Recently, Joan is a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Economics for Environment, Climate Change and Health (WHO TAG-EconECH). He has served as an editor ( Applied Economic Perspectives & Policy), associate editor (Evaluation review) and guest editor (Health Economics, Oxford Review of Economic Policy) of a number of journals.
Joan is an economist deep rooted in social science, and his research interests are organised on three broad areas (i) the economics of healthy ageing and caregiving, (ii) behavioural incentives and health behaviours, the (iii) the political economy of health and inequality. He regularly publishes in all the main field journals in health economics (e.g., Journal of Health Economics, American Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine ), behavioural economics, (e.g., Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation), political economy (e.g., Public Choice, European Journal of Political Economy), inequality (e.g., Journal of Economic Inequality, Social Justice Research), policy ( e.g., Economic Policy, Food Policy, Health Policy), as well as general audience journals in economics (e.g., European Economic Review, Economica, Journal of the European Economic Association), and interdisciplinary sciences (e.g., PNAS, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society). He has completed numerous book chapters and reports for several international governments and organisations.
He is the author of more than 100 articles, and recently, he has published two books: "The Political Economy of Health and Health Care: The Rise of the Patient Citizen" (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and "Behavioural Incentive Design for Health Policy: Steering for Health" (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Joan has edited ( and contributed to several book chapters to ) several other books, including the Handbook of Political Economy of Health Systems (Elgar Edward) and Behavioural Economics & Policy for Pandemics (Cambridge University Press, 2024). He is currently writing two book manuscripts on "The Economics of ageing and caregiving" with LSE colleagues and a textbook on "Metrics for health policy".
CV
Teaching
Programme Director, MSc International Health Policy
Co-Director Executive Program Health Economics, Policy and Management
HP429 Behavioral Incentives in Health and Health Care
HP426 Applied Health Econometrics
HP433 Health Care Regulation
HP4D6E Behavioural Insights for Health Incentive Design
HP500 Advanced Health Policy and Economics
Affiliations
Fellow, CESifo Munich
Fellow, IZA Bonn
Affiliate, Medication Outcomes Centre, University of California San Francisco