Is maternal employment beneficial or harmful for child development? Maternal employment generates income, which is needed to provide core inputs for children's health and education. However, maternal employment comes at the cost of time spent with children, which is also a critical input into...

Using panel datasets from Mexico and Chile for the 2000s, we examine the determinants of middle-class intra-generational mobility. We define the middle class by means of a latent index of economic wellbeing that is less sensitive to short-term fluctuation and measurement error than standard...