Early American life insurers found themselves facing the problem of asymmetric information, as they needed to rely on applicants themselves to provide truthful, complete answers to a standard set of questions. In an attempt to repersonalize the relationship between their boards of directors and the individual applicants, firms selected highly respected local citizens to act as their agents. These agents were expected to evaluate the appearance of candidates, unearth evidence of unhealthy family histories or questionable habits, and attest to the respectability of people writing testimonial letters on an applicant's behalf. In short, the initial purpose of the agency system was not to actively solicit customers, but rather to recreate the glass-bowl mentality associated with small towns or city neighborhoods.

For the clerks who worked in British life-insurance companies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, occupational mobility was both an opportunity that motivated effort and a generator of wide disparities in pay and status. Ambitious clerks learned math in the hope of becoming actuaries. By the end of the nineteenth century, this pattern had changed, owing to the rise of branch networks and accompanying bottle-necks in the promotion process. Insurance companies tried to divert clerks’ ambition by offering them opportunities to engage in sports and other leisure activities, and by enhancing their financial security through staff pension schemes. Although these strategies only succeeded in retaining around half of all entering clerks for more than a few years, the activities added meaning to the lives of those clerks who stayed on and made vital contributions to the rapid growth of one of Britain's most important financial services.

At the end of the twentieth century, the global diffusion of one important financial service, insurance, was encouraged by deregulation, but it also encountered difficulties where deregulation remained incomplete and where there were many nonregulatory barriers to entry. International insurance was already well developed before 1914. The growth in the global insurance trade, however, occurred against a background of increasing national regulation and fiscal burdens in many countries, making international business affordable only for the largest companies with the deepest reserves. This paper offers some preliminary estimates of the extent of the international insurance trade during the half-century before the First World War, and assesses the impact of national regulatory regimes and nonregulatory factors on the development of this business. The analysis is placed within the framework of modern theories of regulation and multinational enterprise.

The number of multinationals in the life-insurance sector expanded during the first era of globalization. Many of these firms gravitated to Spain, attracted by factors such as the country's small number of national companies and minimal regulatory requirements. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Spanish government began to impose more institutional regulations, increasing the guarantees, deposits, and reserves required of insurance companies. In response, American and British multinationals began to leave the Spanish market, propelled both by the new requirements and by a series of external factors that obliged American companies to reduce their international business. Finally, the economic disruption that accompanied the outbreak of World War I convinced American and British multinationals to withdraw from the Spanish insurance business.