This paper uses micro data from a collection of household surveys conducted in 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to examine the time allocation decisions of adolescents. We find that an econometric model with household and country-level variables, when applied simultaneously to all the countries in the sample, is able to predict quite well the choices among school, work, both or neither in most of the countries. Moreover, the household variables alone, especially parental education, go a long way towards predicting the rates of school attendance, which means that the stage of development, as measured by per capita GDP for example, impacts human capital accumulation mainly through the households’characteristics.