• , • v . , - ELSEVIER Labour Economics4 (1997) 185-191 T,ABOUR ECONOMICS Team production in economics: A comment and extension Franklin G. Mixon Jr. * Department of Economics and International Business, The University of Southern Mississippi, Box 5072, USM Station, Hattiesburg, MS 39406-5072, USA Received 15 January 1996; accepted 10 September 1996 JEL classification: A1 Keywords: Mentoring; Co-authoring;Division of labor; Scholarship 1. Introduction In an interesting article in a recent issue of this journal, Laband and Piette (1995) note (as have others before them, such as McDowell and Melvin, 1983; Barnett et al., 1988; Laband, 1993) that there has been a significant rise in the incidence of co-authorship in economic science over time. As pointed out and developed by Barnett et al. (1988), there are two popular hypotheses concerning this rise: (1) increased co-authorship reflects capture by authors of gains from division of labor and specialization, and (2) an increasingly random component to the review process induces authors to engage in academic conglomerate merger as a means of diversifying against risk. The Laband and Piette (1995) study proposes to investigate empirically the nature of the relationship between co-authors in economics. Specifically, they aim to answer two basic questions: (1) does joint production involve same-age/experienced scholars who bring equal, yet comple- mentary skills to the productive process (the specialization hypothesis)? Or, (2) is * Tel.: (+ 1) 601-266.5083; fax: (+ 1) 601-266.4920; e-mail: mixon@cba.usm.edu. 0927-5371/97/$17.00 Copyright © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PH S0927-5371 (96)00028-0