When money was made of gold and silver, individuals faced the problem of determining the intrinsic content of coins in many exchange situations. In this paper we look at a well-documented solution to this problem, and a key institution of the commodity money system: coin assaying. To that goal...

I measure the parameters of coin wear using data collected in the 19th century. A comparison across denominations and countries shows that coin wear (in relative terms) is linear in the logarithm of coin value. Data from coin hoards of the 18th and early 19th centuries yield similar estimates of...