Professor Joan Costa-Font (he/him) works at the LSE as a Professor of Health Economics, and he is a faculty associate of LSE Health where he leads the Ageing and Health Incentives Lab (AHIL), and the International Inequalities Institute, where he co-leads the perceptions of inequality program. He is affiliated with the two major global economics research networks, namely IZA, and CESifo. He specialises in the economics of healthy ageing and behavioural economics and behavioural political economy of health care and health disadvantage.  Joan has been a recipient of a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2001), a Harkness Fellowship (2012) based at Harvard University and a Policy Evaluation Fellowship based at Sciences Po (2022). He has held research and teaching positions at Oxford University, Boston College, UCL, Paris Dauphine, Universita Cattolica, Sciences Po and the University of California San Francisco. In addition to working as a consultant for several national and international organizations, including the House of Lords, the NIHR, Public Health England, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Health Organization, he has led multiple research projects as the primary investigator. Joan serves on the Scientific Committee of the Brocher Foundation (Geneva), the Fondazione Cariplo (Milan), and the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Economics for Environment, Climate Change, and Health (WHO TAG-EconECH).  Joan is an academic and policy-oriented economist, with wider interdisciplinary interests that lie at the interplay of health economics, behavioural economics, and political economy. He works and supervises students on the following topics:

i. Healthy ageing and the financing and organisation of health and long-term care

ii. Inequality perceptions and pro-social behaviours in health and other domains

iii. Social and financial incentives for healthy habit formation and its welfare, gender and labour market effects

iv. The political and social formation of preferences for health care use and insurance

He regularly publishes in all the main field journals in health economics (e.g., Journal of Health Economics, American Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics), behavioural economics, (e.g., Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation), as well as in general audience journals in economics (e.g., European Economic Review, Economica, Journal of the European Economic Association), psychology, political science, public policy and interdisciplinary sciences (e.g., PNAS, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society). He has completed numerous book chapters and reports for several international governments and organisations and has served as editor and guest editor for a number of top journals in behavioural and health economics as well as in economic policy.  He is the author of over 100 articles, and recently, he has published two books: "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). Joan has edited (and contributed to several book chapters to) several other books, including the Handbook of Political Economy of Health Systems (Elgar Edward) and Behavioural Economics & Policy for Pandemics (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Pilar Gonalons-Pons is the Alber-Klingelfhofer Presidential Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with affiliations to the Population Studies Center, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics.She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (2021-2022). Pilar received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a postdoc at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.  Pilar's research examines how gender, work, families, and public policies structure economic inequalities, with a particular focus on how inequalities change over time and over the life course. In her empirical work she typically uses quantitative techniques and longitudinal datasets from multiple countries, but has also used documents and interview data.  Much of Pilar's research is guided by the overall goal to develop a comprehensive understanding about the political economy of care and reproductive paid and unpaid work and its contribution to economic inequalities. Pilar also has interests in understanding how and when change in gender culture occurs and how it shapes family dynamics.  In recent projects Pilar shows that changes in the division of paid and unpaid work play a key role in shaping economic inequalities within and between families (Gonalons-Pons et al. 2021; Musick et al. 2020); that gender culture is key to understanding the relationship between unemployment and divorce (Gonalons-Pons & Gangl 2021); that a basic income policy has potential to transform the economic foundations of romantic relationships (Gonalons-Pons & Calnitsky 2021) as well as patterns of crime including domestic violence (Calnitsky & Gonalons-Pons, 2020); and that employment labor protection policies successfully mitigate earnings losses associated with unemployment both in periods of recession and economic growth (Gonalons-Pons & Gangl 2021).  Pilar's research has appeared in American Sociological Review, Demography, Socio-Economic Review, Social Science Research, Social Problems, Demographic Research, and the RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.