Development statistics estimate that three quarters of the poor live in rural areas and most of them depend on agriculture and related activities for their livelihood. Consequently, research focusing on economic growth and poverty reduction has found that sustainable rapid transition out of poverty requires a special emphasis on the agricultural sector. This study contributes to the debate on aid effectiveness by disaggregating total aid into subcategories and specifically investigating the relationship between aid given to the agricultural sector and poverty reduction. If agricultural development is more effective in reducing poverty than some other types of development, then foreign aid directed towards agriculture may be more efficient in increasing the well-being of the poor than aid directed to some other sectors or uses. Our analysis uses panel data for developing aid recipient countries to empirically test this relationship. We find a significant relationship between agricultural aid and poverty reduction in our estimates.

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Women are more likely than men to report physical and emotional exhaustion related to paid work. While this gender gap in job burnout is common in the literature, the mechanism is yet to be thoroughly understood. Our study offers a novel, and admittedly provocative, explanation for the difference in burnout between men and women. We leverage a US survey rich in job and personal information to test whether theoretically relevant factors explain the gender gap in job burnout. Our results suggest that they may not. Instead we find that workers' perspectives regarding women's role in society drive a large gender gap in job burnout. Specifically, "traditional" women are significantly more likely than men to report job burnout. Thus, providing support and resources to transform perceptions and attitudes regarding gender roles may help to reduce job-related burnout resulting from a mismatch between expectations and paid work experiences.

The link between foreign aid and economic growth has been a controversial issue with no strong consensus so far. This paper argues that a possible reason why some studies may conclude that aid is ineffective in promoting economic growth might be that not all aid is given for development purposes (i.e. aid given for strategic considerations, humanitarian reasons or emergency relief). This study classifies foreign aid into four subcategories: agricultural aid, social infrastructure aid, investment aid, and non-investment aid. Using the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique on a Barro type growth regression with panel data from the aid recipient economies, this paper finds that when aid is directed to the agricultural sector of the developing countries, it is positively and significantly related to growth and can affect economic growth in the short run.