Despite the relevance of parents’ economic participation for children’s future outcomes, few studies have considered the joint contribution of both parents’ joblessness in explaining children’s employment outcomes in the long run. Further, previous studies have used measures of parents’ employment status observed at a single point in time. In contrast, in this study, exposure to dual-parent joblessness is measured in a cumulative fashion using longitudinal data for Australia (from the HILDA Survey, N = 895) and the United States (from the PSID, N = 1,500). We find that, in both countries, dual-parent-child associations are multiple times greater when parents jointly experience joblessness than when either of the parents is jobless. In the United States, family resources fully account for the link between parents’ and their children’s joblessness, whereas this is not the case in Australia. Overall, our study shows that dual-parent joblessness is an independent dimension of stratification that plays a prominent role in the reproduction of social and economic status across generations.

尽管父母的经济参与与孩子的未来结局息息相关，但很少有研究考虑父母双方的失业对长期解释孩子的就业结局的共同贡献。此外，以前的研究使用了在单个时间点观察到的父母就业状况的度量。相反，在这项研究中，使用澳大利亚（来自HILDA调查，N = 895）和美国（来自PSID，N）的纵向数据，以累积方式来衡量双亲失业的风险。= 1,500）。我们发现，在两个国家中，父母共同经历失业的双亲子女协会要比任何一方父母失业的协会大很多倍。在美国，家庭资源充分说明了父母与子女失业之间的联系，而澳大利亚情况并非如此。总体而言，我们的研究表明，双亲失业是分层的一个独立维度，在代代相传的社会和经济地位中发挥着重要作用。