Professor Joan Costa-Font (he/him) works at the LSE as a Professor of Health Economics, and he is a faculty associate of LSE Health where he leads the Ageing and Health Incentives Lab (AHIL), and the International Inequalities Institute, where he co-leads the perceptions of inequality program. He is affiliated with the two major global economics research networks, namely IZA, and CESifo. He specialises in the economics of healthy ageing and the behavioural economics and behavioural political economy of health care and health disadvantage.
Joan has been a recipient of a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2001), a Harkness Fellowship (2012) based at Harvard University and a Policy Evaluation Fellowship based at Sciences Po (2022). He has held research and teaching positions at Oxford University, Boston College, UCL, Paris Dauphine, Universita Cattolica, Sciences Po and the University of California San Francisco. In addition to working as a consultant for several national and international organizations, including the House of Lords, the NIHR, Public Health England, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Health Organization, he has led multiple research projects as the primary investigator. Joan serves on the Scientific Committee of the Brocher Foundation (Geneva), the Fondazione Cariplo (Milan), and the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Economics for Environment, Climate Change, and Health (WHO TAG-EconECH).
Joan is an academic and policy-oriented economist, with wider interdisciplinary interests that lie at the interplay of health economics, the behavioural economics, and political economy. He works and supervises students on the following topics:
i. Healthy ageing and the financing and organisation of health and long-term care
ii. Inequality perceptions and pro-social behaviours in health and other domains
iii. Social and financial incentives for healthy habit formation and its welfare, gender and labour market effects
iv. The political and social formation of preferences for health care use and insurance
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), behavioural economics, (e.g., Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation), as well as in general audience journals in economics (e.g., European Economic Review, Economica, Journal of the European Economic Association), psychology, political science, public policy 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 and has served as editor and guest editor for a number of top journals in behavioural and health economics as well as in economic policy.
He is the author of over 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).
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