Medical experts have argued forcefully that using cigarettes harms health, prompting the adoption of myriad anti-smoking policies. The association between smoking and mortality may, however, be influenced by unobserved factors, making it difficult to discern the underlying long-term causal...

We leverage an event-study research design focused on the seven costliest hurricanes to hit the US mainland since 2004 to identify the elasticity of unemployment insurance filings with respect to search intensity. Applying our elasticity estimate to the state-level Google Trends indexes for the...