Resumen de An empirical analysis of the demand for physician services across the European Union

José María Labeaga Azcona , Sergi Jiménez Martín, Maite Martínez-Granado

• Using three waves of data from the European Community Household Panel this paper estimates demand for health equations for 12 European Countries. The focus is on three specific points: i) the identification of behavioural imilarities and differences in the demand for health across the countries; ii) the variability of the demand for health captured through a joint model for all the countries; iii) the selection of the most appropriate econometric specification for visits to general practitioners and to specialists among two-part and latent class models. We find that there are significant differences across countries, although there are also similarities in the effect of variables such as the health stock, income or family structure. We also find some differences between the behaviour of men and women mainly in the decisions to visit and the number of visits to specialists. The results also suggest that latent class models are more appropriate than two-part models to estimate the general practitioners equations while the opposite is found for visits to the specialists.