James Alan Brander (born 1953) is a Canadian economist and a professor of Asia-Pacific International Trade, University of British Columbia.
He is known as co-author of a seminal 1986 article in The American Economic Review, with Tracy R. Lewis, on "Oligopoly and Financial Structure: The Limited Liability Effect", as well as his work in international trade with Barbara Spencer, particularly the Brander–Spencer model, in which a government can enhance national welfare by subsidizing domestic firms to aid in their competition against foreign markets Brander studied as an undergraduate at the Point Grey campus of the University of British Columbia at the UBC Department of Economics, in 1975, which is among the best in Canada; then received an MA (1978) and a PhD (1979) from Stanford University.
[2] His 1981 paper with Barbara Spencer, Tariffs and the Extraction of Foreign Monopoly Rents Under Potential Entry, won the Harry Johnson Prize of the Canadian Journal of Economics.
[7] Brander and Lewis proposed a duopoly model in which it might be rational for the managers of a corporation to load up on debt, to a degree that would be socially dysfunctional.
In the model, management might deliberately incur debts in order to wed its interests to those of the shareholders and pursue with their support a risky low-margin, high-output strategy that in turn may gain market share.