This paper examines a novel mechanism linking fertility and growth. There are three components to the model: first, increases in capital per worker raise women's relative wages, since capital is more complementary to women's labor input than to men's. Second, increasing women's relative wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children more than household income. And third, lower fertility raises the level of capital per worker. This positive feedback loop generates a demographic transition: a rapid decline in fertility accompanied by accelerated output growth.

We study the relationship of non-quantitative news to bond prices. We select a set of major news events based solely on their significance as judged by historians, and examine the corresponding bond price movements. We find strong evidence that news has some influence on bond price movements, but we find no evidence that news can explain more than a small fraction of those movements.