We provide empirical evidence on the economic benefits of negotiating trades in the upstairs trading room of brokerage firms relative to the downstairs market. Using Helsinki Stock Exchange data, we find that upstairs trades tend to have lower information content and lower price impacts than...

The relation between theorized components of the bid-ask spread and trade size for a sample of NYSE firms is examined. We find that the adverse selection component increases uniformly with trade size. Conversely, order processing costs decrease with increases in trade size for all but the...