The McGraw-Hill Series Economics essentials of economics brue, McConnell, and Flynn Essentials of Economics

11.3
The Method of Generalized Least Squares (GLS)
Why is the usual OLS estimator of
β
2
given in Eq. (11.2.1) not best, although it is still unbi-
ased? Intuitively, we can see the reason from Table 11.1. As the table shows, there is consid-
erable variability in the earnings between employment classes. If we were to regress
per-employee compensation on the size of employment, we would like to make use of the
knowledge that there is considerable interclass variability in earnings. Ideally, we would like
to devise the estimating scheme in such a manner that observations coming from populations
with greater variability are given less weight than those coming from populations with
smaller variability. Examining Table 11.1, we would like to weight observations coming
from employment classes 10–19 and 20–49 more heavily than those coming from employ-
ment classes like 5–9 and 250–499, for the former are more closely clustered around their
mean values than the latter, thereby enabling us to estimate the population regression func-
tion (PRF) more accurately.
Unfortunately, the usual OLS method does not follow this strategy and therefore does
not make use of the “information” contained in the unequal variability of the dependent
variable 
Y
, say, employee compensation of Table 11.1: It assigns equal weight or impor-
tance to each observation. But a method of estimation, known as 
generalized least squares
(GLS),
takes such information into account explicitly and is therefore capable of produc-
ing estimators that are BLUE. To see how this is accomplished, let us continue with the
now-familiar two-variable model:
Y
i
=
β
1
+
β
2
X
i
+
u
i
(11.3.1)
which for ease of algebraic manipulation we write as
Y
i
=
β
1
X
0
i
+
β
2
X
i
+
u
i
(11.3.2)
where 
X
0
i
=
1 for each 
i
. The reader can see that these two formulations are identical.
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