Abstract We investigate the role of strategic security design in the market for retail investment products. Focusing on a dominant yet understudied design feature, we provide evidence consistent with issuers’ strategic increase of product complexity to mitigate price competition. Complexity facilitates product differentiation, thereby impairing investors’ ability to compare products. Because more complex products entail greater markups, imply higher tail risk, and are first-order stochastically dominated by simpler products, the empirically observed rise in market complexity increases uncompensated risk-taking, particularly among less sophisticated investors. Overall, our findings indicate that complexity is shaped by issuers’ deliberate design choice to preserve product rents.

We develop metrics to assess the complexity of a bank holding company (BHC), based on its ownership structure. Large BHCs have intricate ownership hierarchies involving hundreds or even thousands of legal entities that may contribute to increased operational risk and greater opacity. Our measures are mathematically grounded, intuitive, and easy to implement. They may be particularly useful in the context of resolution, where regulators often face significant time pressure and coordination challenges. We use regulatory filing data from the Federal Reserve to validate the measures, demonstrating that they provide a useful complement to balance sheet information in assessing BHC complexity. Notably, the proposed measures are highly correlated with existing complexity indicators that are not based on organizational structure and are less correlated with size than these existing complexity measures. We show that the proposed measures provide additional explanatory power for the regulatory indicators, even after controlling for size.