In this article the organization of early modern trade is analyzed through a case study of the business of Hans Thijs, an Antwerp merchant who worked in Danzig and Amsterdam in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. His career demonstrates how early modern merchants combined markets, personal relations, and firms to govern their transactions. The complementary relationships among these institutions helped to minimize information and enforcement costs. A comparison of Hans Thijs' business organization in Danzig (1585–1595) and in Amsterdam (1595–1611) shows that trade was governed more efficiently in markets of greater scale and scope.

In this article, we examine the decisions made by corporate executives and government officials that led to the discharge with minimal treatment of hundreds of metric tons of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) waste into the Pacific Ocean over several decades. After World War II, Montrose Chemical Corporation of California's Los Angeles plant began making the new wonder pesticide, and Montrose executives worked with local officials to develop a waste disposal system that funneled the plant's process wastes into the county sewer system and ultimately into the ocean. Faced with increasing scientific concern about pesticides and a changed political climate in the 1960s, Montrose vigorously defended DDT and relied increasingly on exports to remain profitable. Years after the plant closed, a federal suit forced Montrose and related companies to pay the costs of environmental cleanup.