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Corporate Insurers in Antebellum America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2012

Robert E. Wright  and
Christopher Kingston
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Abstract

Over the last fifteen years, scholars have documented the rapid development of the U.S. financial system between the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and the Civil War. To date, most of this work has concentrated on commercial banks and securities markets while neglecting the roles early marine, fire, life, and other insurers played in American financial and economic development. This article seeks to redress the balance by presenting new data on the number and authorized capitalizations of specially incorporated insurers in all states prior to 1861, by analyzing agency problems within the insurance industry, and by describing the economic roles fulfilled by those hitherto underappreciated corporate financial intermediaries.

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Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 86 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2012 , pp. 447 - 476
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2012

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References

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62 Where price collusion existed, insurers could agree with each other to set premiums punitively high to extirpate conditions or behaviors they believed to be unnecessary. Where premiums were set competitively, insurers could share some of the expected gains from the new safety technology with policyholders without eliminating all of the arbitrage profit because they understood better than the median policyholder the extent of the savings that new technologies would bring.

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77 Peter Randolph Beverely to Robert Beverely, 30 Mar., 10 Apr. 1819, Beverely Family Papers, VHS.

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79 Peter Randolph Beverely to Robert Beverely, 14, 28, Dec. 1819, Beverely Family Papers, VHS.

80 Peter Randolph Beverely to Robert Beverely, 31 Jan. 1820, Beverely Family Papers, VHS.

81 Ibid.

82 Peter Randolph Beverely to Robert Beverely, n.d., Beverely Family Papers, VHS.

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