Intertemporal Substitution, Exogeneity, and Surprises: Estimating Life Cycle Models for Canada.

The authors estimate consumption and labor supply models for Canada using U.S. variables as instruments instead of lagged Canadian variables. The results suggest that the endogeneity of lagged variables has not been a serious problem in previous studies. They also develop estimation methods for use when the agents' information sets are unknown and the model contains the realization and the innovation of an endogenous variable. The authors use the approach to estimate a labor supply model combining intertemporal substitution and job search, and to estimate the labor supply and consumption responses to marginal utility of income changes induced by wage, price, and interest rate surprises.