Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy. They are the biggest job creators and offer a path to the American Dream. But for many, it is difficult to get the capital they need to operate and succeed. In the Great Recession, access to capital for small businesses froze, and in the aftermath, many community banks shuttered their doors and other lenders that had weathered the storm turned to more profitable avenues. For years after the financial crisis, the outlook for many small businesses was bleak. But then a new dawn of financial technology, or "fintech," emerged. Beginning in 2010, new fintech entrepreneurs recognized the gaps in the small business lending market and revolutionized the customer experience for small business owners. Instead of Xeroxing a pile of paperwork and waiting weeks for an answer, small businesses filled out applications online and heard back within hours, sometimes even minutes. Banks scrambled to catch up. Technology companies like Amazon, PayPal, and Square entered the market, and new possibilities for even more transformative products and services began to appear. In Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream, former U.S. Small Business Administrator and Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School, Karen G. Mills, focuses on the needs of small businesses for capital and how technology will transform the small business lending market. This is a market that has been plagued by frictions: it is hard for a lender to figure out which small businesses are creditworthy, and borrowers often don't know how much money or what kind of loan they need. New streams of data have the power to illuminate the opaque nature of a small business's finances, making it easier for them to weather bumpy cash flows and providing more transparency to potential lenders. Mills charts how fintech has changed and will continue to change small business lending, and how financial innovation and wise regulation can restore a path to the American Dream. An ambitious book grappling with the broad significance of small business to the economy, the historical role of credit markets, the dynamics of innovation cycles, and the policy implications for regulation, Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream is relevant to bankers, fintech investors, and regulators; in fact, to anyone who is interested in the future of small business in America.

"What a breath of fresh air. [This book] takes on the entrenched and very powerful. Superb stuff. . . . Exhilarating."--Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"Here is a searching and spirited story of human intimacy as it sometimes descends into aggression: violence inflicted and vulnerability endured--a melancholy story told with thoughtfulness, with sensitivity, and with a brave willingness to consider the subtleties and ironies of affliction perpetrated and endured."--Robert Coles, Harvard University, editor of "DoubleTake" magazine, and author of "The Secular Mind"

"Mills is thoughtful, nuanced, and original in her analysis of intimate abuse. With compassionate insight, she reveals how insult can lead to injury and outlines a practical alternative path to healing and safety. "This is a feminist critique, and a survivor's, of a mandated one-size-fits-all approach to punishing domestic violence. Mills moves our thinking beyond unilateralism, beyond bilateralism, to a multilateral approach to repairing lives shattered by violence. It poses a profound challenge to existing orthodoxy and should spawn a generation of empirical research to refute, refine. and vindicate its analysis."--John Braithwaite, Australian National University

"Insult to Injury will change the public relationship to intimate violence: "Linda Mills mines the depths of our personal denial, challenging us to return to what we somehow already know. She'll take hits for the honesty--and the expectations it holds out to us. But she's done the long labor of real scholarship, building a sturdy bridge to these next dangerous steps of trust."--Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of "Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Agein the Bronx"

"In this book, Linda Mills generates a bold and provocative thesis. While some may disagree with her, her views must be taken into account in the conversation on domestic violence."--Phyllis Goldfarb, Boston College School of Law

"Mills's accomplishment is impressive and courageous. Clearly and even elegantly written, her book offers a way out of the current unproductive debate about the agency of women in abusive relationships."--Christine A. Littleton, Professor of Law and Chair, Women's Studies Programs, UCLA

"Mills is the right person to write this book, and she does an admirable job."--Richard Gelles, author of "The Violent Home and The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children's Lives"

"I transformed the nature of my fiery tongue to spit knowledge and uplift my family and community rather than to become a statistic. I rose through poetry and I invite you to walk in my footsteps and view my journey through verse, words and imagery." Poetry Rising displays the written "trinity" of poet Gary N. Miller Jr. (The G-Mill): family, community and spiritualty. Come witness the fire and the poetic story of his soul.

Urban Climates is the first full synthesis of modern scientific and applied research on urban climates. The book begins with an outline of what constitutes an urban ecosystem. It develops a comprehensive terminology for the subject using scale and surface classification as key constructs. It explains the physical principles governing the creation of distinct urban climates, such as airflow around buildings, the heat island, precipitation modification and air pollution, and it then illustrates how this knowledge can be applied to moderate the undesirable consequences of urban development and help create more sustainable and resilient cities. With urban climate science now a fully-fledged field, this timely book fulfills the need to bring together the disparate parts of climate research on cities into a coherent framework. It is an ideal resource for students and researchers in fields such as climatology, urban hydrology, air quality, environmental engineering and urban design.

"A Penchant for Prejudice" combines a detailed empirical study of the decision-making practices of judges with a sophisticated theoretical argument which exposes contemporary myths about judging and suggests methods of incorporating the inevitable bias that is detected in this and other studies. Based on a unique study of the decisions of Social Security judges, the book challenges the meaning of judicial impartiality. Linda G. Mills finds that, in practice, bias is a consistent dimension of what is considered "impartial" decision-making. The results reveal that impartiality as the legal system now defines it, is itself a form of bias, and that a historically and contextually sensitive definition of bias, one which takes account of the communities and cultures that come to be judged in the legal system, must overcome the modern dualistic notion of imparitality as the exclusion of bias in order to respond to needs of the diversity of applicants and the judges who adjudicate their claims. According to Mills, the judicial bias she found reflected in her study seems not only to essentialize and stereotype applicants but also prevents judges from engaging vulnerable claimants in a way that the legal process positively demands.
"A Penchant for Prejudice" will be of interest to students and scholars of law, judicial decisionmaking, and discrimination.
Linda G. Mills is Assistant Professor of Social Welfare and Law, University of California, Los Angeles.