Valdez-Jimenez v. Eighth Jud. Dist. Ct.,136 Nev. Adv. Op. 20 (April 9, 2020)

The Court determined what process is constitutionally required when a district court sets bail in an amount that the defendant cannot afford, resulting in pretrial detention. The Court found that bail may only be imposed where it is necessary to reasonably ensure the defendant’s appearance at court proceedings or to reasonably protect the community. If a defendant remains in custody after arrest they are (1) entitled to an individualized hearing, where (2) the State must prove by clear and convincing evidence that bail, rather than less restrictive conditions, is necessary to ensure the defendant’s appearance at future court proceedings or to protect the safety of the community, and (3) the district court must also state its findings and reasons for the bail decision on the record

On the logical definability of certain graph and poset languages

We show that it is equivalent, for certain sets of finite graphs, to be definable in CMS (counting monadic second-order logic, a natural extension of monadic second-order logic), and to be recognizable in an algebraic framework induced by the notion of modular decomposition of a finite graph. More precisely, we consider the set $F\_\infty$ of composition operations on graphs which occur in the modular decomposition of finite graphs. If $F$ is a subset of $F\_{\infty}$, we say that a graph is an \calF-graph if it can be decomposed using only operations in $F$. A set of $F$-graphs is recognizable if it is a union of classes in a finite-index equivalence relation which is preserved by the operations in $F$. We show that if $F$ is finite and its elements enjoy only a limited amount of commutativity -- a property which we call weak rigidity, then recognizability is equivalent to CMS-definability. This requirement is weak enough to be satisfied whenever all $F$-graphs are posets, that is, transitive dags. In particular, our result generalizes Kuske's recent result on series-parallel poset languages

Money, Time Preference and External Balance

In monetary economies, international differences in rates of time preference do not in general lead to long run trade imbalances -- in sharp contrast with Butter's 119811 results on non-monetary overlapping generation economies. This claim is documented within the context of a simple two country framework in which new immortal families enter each economy over time, with the two countries differing only in their subjective discount rates. Even if consumers are more "impatient" at home than abroad, trade is balanced in the long run in the presence of valued fiat currencies in constant supply, and the current account is indeterminate.

Silicon Valley Stories

Many countries try to promote the emergence of technological clusters and ecosystems for growth, counting on the synergies between companies of varying sizes and academic research. Most look to Silicon Valley as the mythical role model. It is therefore worth trying to understand what caused this region's exceptional development. Although abundant literature exists on the subject, it suggests a wide range of explanations. We propose to examine these accounts while trying to avoid boiling down a century of co-evolution in technologies, institutions, professional communities and markets into a few simplistic recipes that will result in inefficient state policies.

Overlapping Generations: the First Jubilee.

Paul Samuelson's (1958) overlapping generations model has turned 50. Seldom has so simple a model been so influential. The paper, in spite of its ripe age, still elicits wonder. Starting from the uncontroversial observation that “we live in a world where new generations are always coming along” Samuelson built a model that violates the credo of the first fundamental welfare theorem with which we still inculcate undergraduates 50 years later. According to Samuelson, all is not necessarily well in the best of market economies: with overlapping generations, even absent the usual suspects such as distortions and market failures, a competitive equilibrium need not be Pareto efficient. Worst of all, this failure of the first welfare theorem in an overlapping generations model occurs in a framework that is, in many ways, more plausible and realistic than the world of agents living synchronous and finite existences in which the theorem is usually proved. Like Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile, the mysterious welfare properties of the overlapping generations model are, to a significant extent, responsible for its popularity—along with the many economic issues it has illuminated in the last half-century. I take it as my brief in this celebratory paper to provide, after a short exposition of the main results of the overlapping generations model under certainty, an explanation of why the welfare properties of the overlapping generations model differ so much from the canonical Arrow–Debreu framework and to review, in a deliberately nonencyclopedic mode, a few striking applications and extensions of Samuelson's deceptively straightforward model.