Joan Costa-Font is a Professor of Health Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). During the 2024/25 academic year, he is on sabbatical as a visiting research scholar at Princeton University. He has previously been a Harkness Fellow at Harvard University and a visiting fellow at Boston College, Oxford University, Sciences Po, and UCL. He has also taught at Paris Dauphine University, the University of Barcelona, and the Università Cattolica. Alongside his affiliation with IZA, he collaborates with CESifo as a research fellow.

His research primarily focuses on two key areas: (i) healthy aging and caregiving, and (ii) the economic determinants and consequences of health disadvantage, broadly defined. This includes exploring behavioral incentives for health, institutional constraints on health care, inequality, and household behavior. Most of his research can be regularly found in all the main field journals in health economics (e.g., Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, American Journal of Health Economics), behavioural economics (e.g., Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty), as well as in mainstream journals in economics (e.g., Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Review, Economica), and interdisciplinary sciences (e.g., Social Science and Medicine, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, PNAS).

Joan has earned three undergraduate degrees (BSc, Licenciado) in economics, law, and political science (Barcelona), both an MA in Economics (UPF) and an MSc (Econ) in International Health Policy (LSE, with distinction & best student prize, 2000), as well as a Ph.D. in Economics (UB), followed by a Marie Curie Post-doctoral Fellowship (LSE).

Joan Costa-Font joined IZA as a Research Fellow in December 2017.