“…2 As posited by Galor and Zeira (1993), Beck et al (2007), Claessens and Perotti (2007), Kim and Lin (2011) and Tan and Law (2012), the poorer face more financial constraints as a result of their lower likelihood of repaying loans, and are the most affected by financial market imperfections, information asymmetries, moral hazard problems, contract enforcement costs, transaction costs, screening costs and monitoring costs because of their lack of collateral, credit histories and connections. Nonetheless, poorer people have higher levels of demand for financial services, especially for credit, because of their 'expenditure cascade' or 'keeping up with the Joneses' behaviour, in terms of consumption of durable goods and/or conspicuous consumption (Gonçalves and Barradas, 2021;Barradas, 2022a). As emphasized by these authors, this occurs because poorer people tend to imitate the lifestyle and consumption standards of richer people because of the strong influence of advertising, marketing and mass media on the attractiveness and temptingness of the new goods and services that are constantly released, such as smartphones and other technological devices (Cynamon and Fazzari, 2008;Barba and Pivetti, 2009).…”