To be honest nobody exactly knows.
If you get an insurance domain with 10k backlinks with anchor "free insurance quotes)(expired) and build a dating website and connect it to a network...Then I dont see why the new website would be a high authority(value or whatever) link while relying on its history only.
People say that some domains lose pr and value and some dont(hit and miss ) but you still need to reduce this risk by using Whois privacy and building the new website in the same niche as the old one.
Take the domain you are trying to see whats going on and go to :
Code:
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
and what it was before