Joan Costa-Font is a Professor of Health Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he helps coordinating the Aging@LSE and the Perceptions of Inequality program, and he leads the Ageing and Health Incentives Lab (AHIL). 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.

Early in his career, he earned three undergraduate degrees (BSc, Licenciado) in economics, law, and political science and sociology, 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), 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, a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Ageing at Oxford University, and a Policy Evaluation Scholar at Sciences Po. He has also held visiting professorships at Columbia University, Boston College, UCL, Paris Dauphine University, and has taught at Università Cattolica and the University of Barcelona.

Alongside his affiliation with IZA, he collaborates with CESifo as a network research fellow. In the last couple of decades, he has helped edit journals on behavioural economics, policy, and applied economics and currently serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Economics of Ageing and the Evaluation Review. Joan Costa-Font joined IZA as a Research Fellow in December 2017.