Has the growth in "fast casual" Mexican restaurants impacted weight gain?

The United States is witnessing a boom in fast casual restaurants owing to the recent growth of ethnic restaurants throughout the country. This study examines the effects of proximity to a Mexican restaurant-the dominant type of ethnic fast casual restaurant-on maternal and child health. I match data on the complete residential addresses of all mothers who gave birth in the Miami metropolitan area between 1990 and 2009 to a time series of all establishments (restaurants and stores) selling food and drink. This unique data set allows me to use mother fixed effects and to exploit the variation over time of the food environment to identify the effects on maternal weight gain and childbirth outcomes. The results show that living in proximity to a Mexican restaurant is associated with an 8% lower likelihood of excessive weight gain among US-born mothers. These effects are concentrated in low-income neighborhoods and among members of disadvantaged groups (e.g., low-skilled, young, and African-American individuals). However, the results show no protective effect for foreign-born mothers. Lastly, there is no evidence of significant effects on other maternal outcomes or on various child health metrics at birth.

Why does the health of Mexican immigrants deteriorate? New evidence from linked birth records.

This study uses a unique dataset linking the birth records of two generations of children born in California and Florida (1970-2009) to analyze the mechanisms behind the generational decline observed in birth outcomes of children of Mexican origin. Calibrating a simple model of intergenerational transmission of birth weight, I show that modest positive selection on health at the time of migration can account for the initial advantage in birth outcomes of second-generation Mexicans. Moreover, accounting for the socioeconomic differences between second-generation Mexicans and white natives and the observed intergenerational correlation in birth weight, the model predicts a greater deterioration than that observed in the data. Using a subset of siblings and holding constant grandmother quasi-fixed effects, I show that the persistence of healthier behaviors among second-generation Mexican mothers can explain more than half of the difference between the model prediction and the observed birth outcomes of third-generation Mexicans.