The obstruction to the existence of Fredholm problems for elliptic differentail operators on manifolds with edges is a topological invariant of the operator. We give an explicit general formula for this invariant. As an application we compute this obstruction for geometric operators.
Exterior tensor products of elliptic operators on smooth manifolds and manifolds with conical singularities are used to obtain examples of elliptic operators on manifolds with edges that do not admit well-posed edge boundary and coboundary conditions.