This communication assesses the use of a portable near infrared (NIR) instrument to measure quantitative (fatty acid profile) properties and qualitative (‘Premium’ and ‘Non-premium’) categories of individual Iberian pork carcasses at the slaughterhouse. Acorn-fed Iberian pigs have more unsaturated fats than pigs fed conventional compound feed. Recent advances in miniaturisation have led to a number of handheld NIR devices being developed, allowing processing decisions to be made earlier, significantly reducing time and costs. The most common methods used for assessing quality and authenticity of Iberian hams are analysis of the fatty acid composition of subcutaneous fat using gas chromatography and DNA analysis. In this study, NIR calibrations for fatty acids and classification as premium or non-premium ham, based on carcass fat measured in situ, were developed using a portable NIR spectrometer. The accuracy of the quantitative equations was evaluated through the standard error of cross validation or standard error of prediction of 0.84 for palmitic acid (C16:0), 0.94 for stearic acid (C18:0), 1.47 for oleic acid (C18:1) and 0.58 for linoleic acid (C18:2). Qualitative calibrations provided acceptable results, with up to 98% of samples (n = 234) correctly classified with probabilities ⩾0.9. Results indicated a portable NIR instrument has the potential to be used to measure quality and authenticity of Iberian pork carcasses.

Colonial Virginia's legislature introduced an inside paper money into its domestic economy that was, at that time, primarily a barter economy without any government or bank-issued inside paper monies in circulation. I decompose Virginia's paper money into its expected real-asset present value, risk discount and transaction premium. The value of Virginia's paper money was determined primarily by its real-asset present value. The transaction premium was small. Positive risk discounts occurred in years when monetary troubles were suspected, namely worries that the government would not redeem the paper money as promised. Counterfeiting, however, was not one of these worries. The legislature had the tools and used them effectively to mitigate the effects of counterfeiting on the value of its paper money. Colonial Virginia's paper money was not a fiat currency, but a barter asset, with just enough transaction premium to make it the preferred medium of exchange for local transactions. It functioned like a zero-coupon bond and traded below face value due to time-discounting, not depreciation.

Over 800 clay coin moulds, excavated from 85 London Wall in 1988, had been used for casting copies of silver denarii and copper-alloy dupondii and asses which dated from Trajan to Trebonianus Gallus. The discovery of the moulds in the ditch of Londinium's defensive wall led initially to thoughts that this was the concealment of incriminating evidence, but it is now recognised that counterfeiting coins was rife and perhaps even uncontrollable. The wide variety of moulds made it a complicated task to identify the numbers and types of coins used to make the moulds. This article describes the types of moulds found, examines how the moulds were produced, and discusses the prevalence of coin moulds at differing periods and on differing sites in Roman Britain and on the Continent.

We study counterfeiting of currency in a search-theoretic model of monetary exchange. In contrast to Nosal and Wallace [Journal of Monetary Economics 54, 229–246 (2007)], we establish that counterfeiting does not pose a threat to the existence of a monetary equilibrium; i.e., a monetary equilibrium exists irrespective of the cost of producing counterfeits, or the ease with which genuine money can be authenticated. However, the possibility of counterfeiting fiat money can affect its value, velocity, output, and welfare, even if no counterfeiting occurs in equilibrium. We provide two extensions of the model under which the threat of counterfeiting can materialize: counterfeits can circulate across periods, and sellers set terms of trade in some matches. Policies that make the currency more costly to counterfeit or easier to recognize raise the value of money and society's welfare, but the latter policy does not always decrease counterfeiting.