The performance of formal demographic feedback models, like Ronald Lee's, provides a test of whether theories of endogenous fertility adjustment, like Richard Easterlin's, can explain the cyclic swings in U.S. and other births that they were designed to explain. This paper shows how the specification of a demographic feedback model determines its ability to sustain cycles of a given period and amplitude observed in data. Only a few of the many versions of Easterlin-style theories imply formal models which do prove capable of matching U.S. targets, and then only by narrow margins. The general methods presented here are suitable for a broad investigation of the possible role of age-specific feedback in the diversity of more and less cyclic patterns in birth series in the developed world.
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