Assume a common support, a differentiable likelihood, and dominated differentiation under the integrals. The score function has mean zero. Its second moment is the Fisher information . If is unbiased, differentiation of gives , hence . The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality yields
the Cramér-Rao lower bound, assuming positive finite information.
Equality holds precisely when the centred estimator and score are linearly dependent almost surely. The covariance fixes the factor, giving . If the same unbiased estimator is efficient for every parameter on a regular interval, integrate this identity in :
Exponentiation gives , an exponential family. This proves efficient unbiased estimator implies exponential family under the stated common-support regularity, rather than asserting it for nonregular support-dependent models.