Spatial mobility and environmental effects on obesity

•We adopt a randomized experiment to assess environmental causes of obesity.•We link our data with environmental factors thought to be causes of obesity.•Identified factors are unable to explain decreases in obesity in our sample.

In this paper, we used a randomized experiment, the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO) study, to assess whether several environmental attributes are causes of obesity. To accomplish our objective, we linked the MTO data with several external data sources that provide information on potential determinants of obesity including food prices, restaurant and food store availability, physical activity facility availability, the prevalence of crime and population density. We find that the environmental factors we examined are unable to explain the observed decrease in obesity associated with the MTO experiment among low-income minority women.