Joan Costa-i-Font

Professor Joan Costa-i-Font is a Professor of Health Economics, the team leader of the Ageing and Health Incentives Lab (AHIL), and a faculty associate of the International Inequalities Institute. He is network research fellow at CESifo (since 2008), HEDG (since 2007) and IZA (since 2017). He has taught at the University of Barcelona, Universita Cattolica, and Paris Dauphine, and has held visiting research positions at University of Munich (2008), Oxford University (2009), Boston College (2013) and UCL (2016).

Joan has earned both a Harkness Fellowship at Harvard University and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the LSE. He is a visiting scholar in policy evaluation at Sciences Po in Paris in 2022/23 and has been the principal investigator in several research projects and has served as a consultant for a number of international (the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Health Organisation, Public Health England and the European Commission), and national organisations (Cabinet office, NIHR, Public Health England, House of Lords). He currently serves as the book review editor of Behavioural Public Policy and is one of the associate editors of Evaluation Review, and has been editor of Applied Economic, Perspectives and Policy.

Joan’s draws on insights of health, behaviour and political economics to study ‘ageing and health disadvantage’. His current projects are organised on three broad programs (i) the economics of healthy ageing and caregiving, (ii) behavioural incentives and health inequality and the (iii) the political economy of health and health care.

He regularly publishes in all the main field journals in health economics (Journal of Health Economics, American Journal of Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine, Health Economics, Economics and Human Biology), behavioural economics, (Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation), and political economy (Public Choice, Economics & Politics, European Journal of Political Economy), as well as general audience journals in economics (Economica, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Economic Inequality), politics (Governance, Publius), interdisciplinary social science (Kyklos), medical (JAMA) and general interest journals. He has completed numerous book chapters and reports for several international governments and organisations.

After publishing The Political Economy of Health and Health Care: The Rise of the Patient Citizen on political incentives in health care, Behavioural Incentive Design for Health Policy: Steering for Health is his most recent book on behavioural health economics published by Cambridge University Press. He has edited and contributed to the Handbook of Political Economy of Health Systems (Elgar Edward) and Behavioural Economics & Policy for Pandemics (Cambridge University Press) both out in 2023.

Teaching

• Programme Co-Director, MSc International Health Policy
• HP429 Behavioral Incentives in Health and Health Care
• HP426 Applied Health Econometrics
• HP433 Health Care Regulation
• HP4D6E Behavioural Insights for Health Incentive Design

Expertise Details

Ageing; Long Term Care; Behavioural Incentives; Health Inequality; Health Behaviours; Overweight; Sleep; Nutrition; Smoking; Alcohol; Institutional Reforms and Health Disadvantage; Family Health Behaviours; Gender and Health