The Effectiveness of Public and Private Sector Summary Risk Measures in Predicting Insurer Insolvencies

This article investigates the abilities of four key summary risk measures to predict property-liability insurer insolvencies. The four summary risk measures studied are the NAIC's risk-based capital ratios, the NAIC's financial analysis solvency tools (FAST) scores, A.M. Best's Capital Adequacy Relativity ratios, and A.M. Best's ratings. The empirical tests find that the risk measures produced by the private sector are superior in predictive ability to the measures produced by regulators, perhaps because of the qualitative adjustments made by private sector analysts. The results also demonstrate that overall measures of risk are substantially better than risk-based capital measures in predicting insolvencies. Another finding is that the predictive ability of the NAIC's RBC ratios can be improved substantially if ranks are used rather than the ratios themselves.