James Costain has been a staff economist at the Banco de España (Bank of Spain) since 2006. He received his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1997, and has been a faculty member at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) and Universidad Carlos III (Madrid), as well as a frequent visitor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research studies how realistic frictions affect the dynamics of general equilibrium models of the macroeconomy. He has especially focused on search frictions in the labour market, incomplete insurance markets, nominal rigidities, aggregation of heterogeneous information, and costly decision-making. Much of his recent work studies macroeconomic policy interactions in the euro area.