This paper joins in the debate on the size of the middle class in Latin America, providing an analysis of its structure and characteristics. Using several measurements, it finds that 40-60 percent of Latin American households are middle class, a share which has consolidated over the past decade....

The main contribution of this paper with respect to previous work is the use of data on subjective perceptions to identify the Latin American middle classes. This paper provides a set of comparisons between objective and subjective definitions of middle-class using data from the 2007 World...

Health constitutes a fundamental aspect of our well-being. It is also a key factor in determining our contribution to market and non-market output. Health inequality refers to the unequal realization of health outcomes between different groups in the population. Systematic disparities in health...

This paper uses standard fiscal incidence analysis to study how much income redistribution and poverty reduction are accomplished through the fiscal system in eighteen Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. We show there is considerable heterogeneity in the income inequality and...

The year 2020 is a critical year for sustainable development policy and practice with the review and renewal of various international commitments including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Paris Agreement. The post-2020 agenda needs to be informed...

The effects of early life circumstances on cognitive skill formation are important for later human capital development, labor market outcomes and well-being. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the first 1,000 days are the critical window for both cognitive skill formation and physical...

This paper provides a summary of the findings contained in a forthcoming issue of the Latin American Journal of Economics on entrepreneurship in Latin America as a vehicle for upward social mobility, especially for the middle class. The income persistence coefficients estimated with pseudo-panel...

This working paper studies the effect of remittances from the United States on crime rates in Mexico. The topic is examined using municipal-level data on the percent of household receiving remittances and homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Remittances are found to be associated with a decrease...

We identify whether remittances facilitate consumption smoothing during health shocks in Jamaica. In addition, we investigate whether remittances are subject to moral hazard by receivers, how the informal insurance provided by remittances interacts with formal health insurance, and whether there...