The financial service industry is becoming increasingly complex and more difficult to regulate. This brief describes broker-dealers and investment advisers—their numbers, size, assets, clients, services, and affiliations—and examines whether individual investors understand the differences...

This PDF document was made available as a public service of the RAND Corporation. In recent years, the evolution of the financial service industry has blurred traditional distinctions between broker-dealers and investment advisers and made it difficult to design appropriate regulatory schemes...