Francoise Velde is an economist with the Federal Reserve of Chicago. Unlike Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and the other theoreticians, he actually studies numismatics as the evidence of economics. Academia.edu is a commercial (more or less) archive of research papers. (I have a couple there, also.) A Quantitative Approach to the Origins of Coinage by Francoise Velde examines the hoard evidence of the oldest known coins. https://www.academia.edu/4192184/A_Quantitative_Approach_to_the_Beginnings_of_Coinage He has 43 papers there, including one on the Crime of '73, and other US topics. Most are on wider problems. This one is about the coinage of France in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, it bears directly on US coinage because the thesis is that the smaller the coin, the more it circulates. On the Evolution of Specie: Circulation and Weight Loss in 18th and 19th Century Coinage (Revue Numismatique Année 2013 170 pp. 605-650) https://www.academia.edu/3709274/On..._Weight_Loss_in_18th_and_19th_Century_Coinage The data for this and other research come from government investigations related to recoinage. Generally speaking, minor coinage has always been by count ("by tale"). Gold coins have been by weight. Even in US law, there was a limit on how worn a gold coin could be to still have been legal tender. So, in this case above, the French government weighed hundreds of thousands of coins. (The British did something similar several times with their great recoinages.). The USA never had a great recoinage. But if you look at your coins... It did not matter what the alloy was or the size or the weight. All that mattered was what they bought on the street and the smaller the range of value, the more a coin circulated. Apparently this has been true since 550 BCE.
