GENDER AND THE DEMAND FOR MEDICAL-CARE

The consumption of a set of diverse medical services is analysed in an effort to determine the sources of high utilization by women. Unlike previous studies of gender and the demand for medical services, the ra nge of services investigated allows us to draw conclusions about the i nfluence of physicians as agents. We use a modified version of the alm ost-ideal demand model in the empirical analysis which, unlike the dou ble-log, quadratic, or linear demand models, is consistent with constr aints imposed by economic theory. Through decomposition of the varianc e, it was found that if women reported the same series of health indic ators as men, their use of most services would fall below that of men.