According to data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, in 2006,
almost 27% of 16-year-old students pursuing a full-time education reported having a part-time
job during the school term.2 Although the intensity of their labour market participation
varied, those who worked spent 6.5 hours per week on average in paid employment, which is
lower than the 11 hours spent in employment by their American counterparts (Rothstein,
2007). Despite this, part-time employment among full-time students in the UK is an
important form of labour market participation, and one that is often neglected in economic
research. By contrast, there are a larger number of empirical studies relating to the United
States, dating from the 1980s (Meyer and Wise, 1982) to more recent research (Sabia, 2009;
Kalenkoski and Pabilonia, 2009). However, these focus mainly on the work experiences of
college and university students, while less attention is given to the employment of those still
in compulsory full-time education