Multiple job holding in the United Kingdom: evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

Abstract

This article examines the determinants of multiple job holding in the UK. We address these issues using data from the first 11 waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which covered the period from 1991 to 2001. Evidence from the BHPS does not support the hypotheses of main job hours constrained and main job insecurity. We argue that the incentive for moonlighting in the UK is due to financial pressures and the desire for heterogeneous jobs. The empirical work is carried out separately for men and women.

Acknowledgements

Zhongmin Wu is grateful to Professor Jim Hughes for his help on the early version of this article. The data used in the analysis are from Waves 1–11 of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The authors thank the UK Data Archive at Essex University for providing access to the BHPS.

Notes

¹ We thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out.

² There is a very small literature on the determinants of self-employment, see e.g. Blau (1987), Clark et al. (1998), de Wit (1993), Ajayi-Obe and Parker (2005) and Cueto and Mato (2006). However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has ever attempted to model self-employment and multiple-job-holding jointly, due to problems with measurement and identification. We argue that a full-treatment of self-employment is beyond the scope of this article, but will show evidence in the Appendix that our main findings remain robust with respect to the exclusion of all self-employed (in either the main or the second job).

³ Results of these estimations are available from the first author upon request.