Free Trade Agreements and World Obesity

We study the causal link between trade openness via free trade agreements and obesity rates. We apply a difference-in-differences approach and exploit the year a country entered a free trade agreement with the United States during the period 1990 to 2016. We find statistically and economically significant results and show that our findings are robust to placebo tests, the use of synthetic control methods, and mechanically maximizing the sample. Additionally, we show that when using event studies the equal trends assumption holds.