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Symmetric generalized Heckman models

The sample selection bias problem arises when a variable of interest is correlated with a latent variable, and involves situations in which the response variable had part of its observations censored. Heckman (1976) proposed a sample selection model based on the bivariate normal distribution that fits both the variable of interest and the latent variable. Recently, this assumption of normality has been relaxed by more flexible models such as the Student-t distribution (Marchenko and Genton, 2012; Lachos et al., 2021). The aim of this work is to propose generalized Heckman sample selection models based on symmetric distributions (Fang et al., 1990). This is a new class of sample selection models, in which variables are added to the dispersion and correlation parameters. A Monte Carlo simulation study is performed to assess the behavior of the parameter estimation method. Two real data sets are analyzed to illustrate the proposed approach.