Dr Andres Barajas Paz

Academic Leadership and Affiliations

Andres has also taught at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh) as an Assistant Professor (1-year contract), and he was also a Research Associate working with Dr Catherine Donnelly at Heriot-Watt University (UK). Andres is currently working as an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt (Dubai). He has collaborated as a volunteer with the HMD to see how their approach can be adapted to Mexican data for producing complete life table series, which is also relevant to international reinsurance.Andres has also been invited for a research visit at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR) along with the UNSW Business School in Sydney Australia to work with Michael Sherries and Francesco Ungolo on a project to analyze the interaction between investment risk-sharing and longevity risk-sharing across generations in the collective defined contribution (CDC) pension scheme using the CDC model suggested by Barajas-Paz and Donnelly (2023) that already shows the results of investment risk-sharing between generations.

Qualifications:

Andres holds a PhD in Actuarial Mathematics from Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh) which was supported through a PhD scholarship from the Actuarial Research Centre (ARC) of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA), and Supervised by Andrew Cairns and Torsten Kleinow. He currently provides his services to the IFoA as an independent consultant by marking the IFoA examinations (Actuarial Statistics CS1).

His main research interest it is in the area of Actuarial risk management along with Bayesian statistics, poor-quality data issues and Mortality models. For instance, due to his collaboration with the Human Mortality Database (HMD), they published a paper on Mexican mortality evaluating unadjusted mortality estimates for Mexico during 1990‒2016 and comparing them with other published estimates for Mexico and with the historical mortality patterns observed among the 41 Human Mortality Database (HMD) populations, and they investigated the effect of various adjustments on estimated life expectancy. In addition, during his PhD he worked on a new model that estimates the level of digit preference in population and deaths data in a country with potentially unreliable population data.

Glei, D., Barajas Paz, A., Aburto, J. M., Barbieri, M. (2021). Mexican Mortality 1990- 2016: Comparison of Unadjusted and Adjusted Estimates. Demographic Research, published in Demographic Research (Volume 44 - Article 30 | Pages 719–758), www.demographic-research.org 

Barajas-Paz, A. and Donnelly, C. (2023) ‘An attribution analysis of investment risk sharing in collective defined contribution schemes’, Annals of actuarial science, 17(2), pp. 385–414. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1748499523000015. 

Awards:

Andres was awarded with the "Alfonso Caso Prize 2016" for his excellence on his MSc in Finance studies and for having the best dissertation. 
Barajas-Paz, A. and Donnelly, C. received the IFoA’s Geoffrey Heywood Prize 2023