確保保險公司的財務健全一直是保險監理的焦點。在各種監理方法中，風險基礎資本代表目前在保險業中最先進的方法，而涉險值則是已廣泛被其他金融業的監理機關所採納。本研究的目的，是以美國產險業的實證資料，檢驗這兩種方法在預測產險公司破產的能力上孰優孰劣。 我們發現涉險值比較能夠事前偵測出有問題的公司，也比較能正確地區分健全與不健全的公司。風險基礎資本則幾乎沒有預警的能力，必須將風險基礎資本乘以數倍以後才能有一些預警的效果。雖然涉險值比風險基礎資本要好，表現仍差強人意，其型二錯誤率偏高，猜測正確率也偏低。作者們認為這個不盡如意的結果，是因為我們沒有足夠的資料來正確地估計保險公司的損失函數。

Assuring insurance companies’ solvencies has always been the focal point of insurance regulation. Among solvency regulation methods, risk based capital (RBC) represents the leading capital adequacy requirement in the insurance industry while value at risk (VaR) has been adopted by more and more regulators in other financial industries. The purpose of this research is to empirically compare the effectiveness of RBC and VaR in the solvency predictions of insurance companies. Using the solvency record of property-casualty insurers in the United States from 1995 to 1998, we examine the Type I and Type II errors of VaR and RBC in classifying insurers. RBC figures are from the annual statements and VaR is estimated from our simulation model that is also based on insurers’ financial statements. We find that VaR is better than RBC in spotting unhealthy insurers and correctly classifying insurers. VaR has lower type I error rates and higher hit ratios. On the other hand, RBC has hardly any early warning abilities and very low hit ratios. The capital requirement set up by RBC is too low to detect problematic insurers in advance. Regulators have to raise RBC requirements many times to achieve acceptable early warning abilities. Although VaR is superior to RBC, the performance of VaR obtained from our model is not satisfactory. The type II error rates are high and hit ratios are low. We attribute the unsatisfying outcome to the lack of data in estimating loss functions.