Professor Joan Costa-Font (he/him) is an academic and policy-oriented economist currently working as a Professor of Health Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he is one of the coordinators of the Ageing@LSE group. He is a faculty associate of LSE Health and the International Inequalities Institute, where he leads the Ageing and Health Incentives Lab (AHIL) and co-leads the perceptions of inequality program respectively. He is affiliated with the two major global economics research networks, namely IZA, and CESifo.
Professor Costa-Font is a highly cited health economist and public policy scholar that has published over a hundred articles in a wide range of leading journals (e.g., the Journal of Health Economics, American Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Review, PNAS, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society). He has authored and edited books for both Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, and his recent titles include "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), the Handbook of Political Economy of Health Systems (Elgar Edward) and Behavioural Economics & Policy for Pandemics (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Professor Costa-Font has served as editor and guest editor for several top journals in policy evaluation, health policy, behavioural and applied economics. He has completed numerous reports for several international organisations including the recent WHO Global Repot of LTC Financing, 2023, and currently he leads the LSE-Vitality partnership program “behavioural incentives for long term health”.
Professor Costa-Font’s research spans across fields and has an interdisciplinary and an international focus. Currently, his projects aim at advancing our knowledge of both the political economy and behavioural economics of health and aging. Joan supervises students on a range of topics, including:
- The socio-economic determinants of healthy aging, particularly focusing on gender, distributional impacts, and labour market effects
- The household and well-being effects of health and caregiving arrangements
- The political and behavioural drivers of health inequality
- The effectiveness of social and financial incentives in modifying health-related habits
He has held research positions at Harvard University as a Harkness Fellow, at Sciences Po as a Policy Evaluation Fellow, and is currently a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University’s Centre for Health and Wellbeing. Furthermore, he has served as a visiting professor at Columbia University, UCL Paris Dauphine, the University of California, San Francisco, and Università Cattolica. Earlier in his career, he earned a Marie Curie Fellowship at the London School of Economics.
In addition to his academic roles, Joan has consulted for various national and international organizations, including the House of Lords, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Public Health England, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Health Organization. He has led numerous research projects as the principal investigator and currently serves on the Scientific Committee of the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, as well as on the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Economics for Environment, Climate Change, and Health (WHO TAG-EconECH).
CV
Joan is currently on sabbatical during academic year 2024/25.
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