We study the shrinking and separation properties (two notions well-known in descriptive set theory) for NP and coNP and show that under reasonable complexity-theoretic assumptions, both properties do not hold for NP and the shrinking property does not hold for coNP. In particular we obtain the following results. NP and coNP do not have the shrinking property unless PH is finite. In general, ΣnP and ΠnP do not have the shrinking property unless PH is finite. This solves an open question posed by Selivanov (1994) [33].The separation property does not hold for NP unless UP⊆coNP.The shrinking property does not hold for NP unless there exist NP-hard disjoint NP-pairs (existence of such pairs would contradict a conjecture of Even et al. (1984) [6]).The shrinking property does not hold for NP unless there exist complete disjoint NP-pairs. Moreover, we prove that the assumption NP≠coNP is too weak to refute the shrinking property for NP in a relativizable way. For this we construct an oracle relative to which P=NP∩coNP, NP≠coNP, and NP has the shrinking property. This solves an open question posed by Blass and Gurevich (1984) [3] who explicitly ask for such an oracle.© 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.