Joan Costa-Font is a Professor of Health Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he coordinates the Aging@LSE and the Perceptions of Inequality program, and he leads the Ageing and Health Incentives Lab (AHIL). During the 2024/25 academic year, he is on sabbatical as a visiting research scholar at Princeton University.

His research primarily focuses on healthy ageing and inequality broadly defined, and he is interested in questions at the borders of health economics, behavioural economics, and political economy. Most of his research can be regularly found in all the main field journals in health economics (e.g., Journal of Health Economics, American Journal of Health Economics), behavioural economics (e.g., Journal of Risk and Uncertainty), and political economy, as well as in mainstream journals in economics (e.g., Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Review), interdisciplinary science (e.g., PNAS), medicine, and policy.

Joan is an eclectic economist with a wide range of interests, and his work always has a policy focus. Early in his career, he earned three undergraduate degrees (BSc, Licenciado) in economics, law, and political science and sociology, both an MA in Economics (UPF), an MPhil in International Economic Law (UB), and an MSc (Econ) in International Health Policy (LSE, with distinction & best student prize, 2000), alongside a PhD in Economics (UB), which allowed him to earn a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (LSE). He has been a Harkness Fellow at Harvard University and a visiting fellow at Columbia University, Boston College, Oxford University, Sciences Po, and UCL. He has also taught at Paris Dauphine University, the Università Cattolica, and the University of Barcelona, where he taught for four years as a tenured professor and was appointed professor of economics before joining the LSE faculty.

Alongside his affiliation with IZA, he collaborates with CESifo as a network research fellow, and he is on several WHO advisory boards. He has helped edit journals on behavioural economics, economic policy, and applied economics and currently serves as an associate editor of both the Journal of Economics of Ageing and the Evaluation Review.

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