The paper investigates the impact of public support for innovation activities on adoption of different innovation strategies and propensities to introduce product, process, organizational and marketing innovations in European small and medium enterprises. In estimating these effects, country and sectoral heterogeneities are taken into account. Effectiveness of alternative policy mixes is also evaluated. The analysis is based on a multivariate, multi-stage econometric model and data from the Community Innovation Survey 2014. It is found that innovation support is utilized differently by newer and older members of the European Union, with the former investing mainly in acquisition of machinery, equipment, software, buildings, knowledge and trainings and the latter directing aid, to a larger extent, to research and development and introduction of innovations. The results also indicate various effectiveness of support from alternative institutional sources. Aid from the EU is more beneficial for manufacturing, while national and local support is more effective in older EU countries than newer members of the European Union and services sector. Using various but not all types of policy mixes is estimated to increase the chances of innovating. It is concluded that innovation support might not be optimally used in newer members of the EU and that better coordination of aid from the EU and national institutions could lead to improved economic results.

This paper examines the relationship between innovation performance and employment growth in firms by taking a closer look at specific innovation activities and industry effects in the context of the services sector. Firm-level CIS data on Polish services firms in 2004–2009 are analysed using robust M-estimation. The results indicate that the effects of product, process and organisational innovations depend strongly on the level of technological opportunities in the industry in question. Given the widely acknowledged role of marketing innovations in services, possible synergies between innovations in the form of new products and new marketing techniques are also analysed. We demonstrate that marketing innovations are conducive to firm growth if they complement product innovations, but they are less likely to foster growth when applied in isolation.

This paper analyses spatial differences in the voting results in Poland in the 2015 parliamentary elections. Eleven clusters defining different support profiles are determined using the two most popular stopping rules. Parameters of the multinomial logit model are estimated and determinants of Polish communes' membership in specific clusters are identified. The results of the estimation indicate that economic, sociodemographic and location variables strongly determined the Poles' electoral preferences. However, historical and cultural factors turned out to be the most important determinants.

This paper examines the comovements of stock markets in the CEE-3 (Central and Eastern European: Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary) countries using the VAR-GARCH-BEKK model over the period 2005–13. Research indicates that in the CEE-3 countries, volatility spillovers played a dominant role and that the stock exchanges in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary did not react similarly to the global shocks of the recent crisis (2007–2013). We use a dynamic version of the Diebold–Yilmaz volatility spillover index to present the evolution of volatility transmission over time. The results show that the CEE-3 countries were volatility-takers in the period under analysis and that volatility spillovers were extremely high during periods characterized by market uncertainty.