Births time series models and structural interpretations.

Abstract Saboia (1977) has developed a theory relating a particular type of births autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model to the classical deterministic cohort model of population growth. Reexamination of the data used by Saboia indicates that his estimated births models contain common factors and insignificant coefficients and cannot be regarded as evidence in favor of his argument. It is shown, however, that well-known theory on the relationship between deterministic and stochastic structural models and ARMA processes does provide the link and that Saboia's argument can be regarded as a special case of this general theory.