Evaluating the demographic impact of societal events through intervention analysis: The brown vs. Board of Education decision

Using intervention analysis—a time-series technique gaining increasing use for analyzing the impacts of policy decisions/historic events—this paper reexamines the hypothesis offered by Rindfuss et al., that one consequence of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 was a temporary decline in childbearing by white southerners. With data from the 11 former Confederate states, alternative Box-Jenkins/intervention models were estimated to identify/quantify such a decline, but no statistical evidence of a temporary shift in southern white fertility could be found.