O52 - Economywide Country Studies: EuropeReturn

Volume indicators are often combined with information about stock prices development. Technical analysts use trading volume as a support tool to confirm trend directions. I focused on the Warsaw Stock Exchange that is one of the most dynamically growing capital markets in Europe and I tried to detect if trading volume can be used as a support tool the technical analysis on this stock market. Data of 67 companies was analysed in 2008 - 2018 using the Granger causality. The findings show, both the correlation and the Granger causality was determined in most cases for investment sector and real estate sector that could be caused, for example by higher share on GDP of these sectors in comparison with other analysed industries, market position of companies, and by interest of investors. However, it seems trading volume as a support tool of the technical analysis is more relevant on more developed and high liquidity markets.

The stock prices of companies are influenced by many variables; two basic categories are macroeconomic and microeconomic factors. The objective of this paper is to analyze the existence of a relationship between select microeconomic variables and the stock returns of financial sector companies listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange. The institutions that were chosen are Immofinanz AG, Raiffeisen Bank International AG, Erste Group Bank AG, Uniqa Insurance Group AG and Vienna Insurance Group AG. The focus is on Austria due to the lack of empirical literature on problematics of linkages between stock prices and microeconomic factors. A possibility of the existence of the cointegration relationships can be a useful for share traders and investors who want to make higher profits. A time series with semi-annual frequency are used to examine the occurrence of long-term and short-term cointegration links using the Johansen and the Granger tests. Further the analysis of the Generalized method of moments. The empirical estimates are calculated for the 2005 - 2015 period, which includes the global financial crisis. According to the theory it is expected positive relationship between selected microeconomic variables and the stock returns.

The contribution verifies, whether the competitiveness of the European Union economies tends to converge or diverge. The competitiveness of a country is defined as the ability to create innovations. Innovations represent an important resource of the qualitative competitive advantage, which is crucial for sustainable competitiveness in the long term. We observed the composite indicator development in the time period 2000-2012 with focus on the trend dissimilarities in the European Union. We used a cluster analysis and beta and sigma convergence methods to the convergence/divergence tendency verification. The results of all three methods confirmed the converging trend of competitiveness in the European Union. We found out that initially less competitive economies are catching up with initially more competitive countries and the competitiveness of individual countries as well as the EU as a whole increase at the same time.

Certain fundamentals of the nanotechnology (NT) discipline can be already found in 1870, when two professors Elihu Thomson and Edwin Houston experimented and later patented inventions on the existing arc lamps and dynamo design. The emergence of NT as a new scientific discipline can be found a hundred years later and it is also connected with the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope and the discovery of fullerenes. Among the first companies that patented NT were: General Electric, Unisys, Honeywell, DuPont, Bell Labs, and IBM. Among the first patenting areas of NT were: nano-materials, nano-manufacturing and nano-interactions. This scientific study has two particular goals. Methodological part (Chapter 1 and 2) provides a clear insight into selected topical issues of patenting, searching and categorization of NT. This part is often overlooked/simplified in many scientific papers on NT, which brings a lot of uncertainty for this discipline. The second part is the systemic analysis (Chapter 3) that is to provide a clear insight into the patented NT in the EU, based on the comprehensive statistics of the European database of EPO patents (1940-2015). But, the main scientific goal of this study is to make some conclusions for the promotion of innovation and patenting NT in the EU.

This article deals with the funding of research and development in new EU member states. The introductory part of the text offers a theoretical characteristic of the area of research and development. In the second part, there is described the funding, human resources in the research and development area and the results. The final part provides a discussion of the efficiency of the research and development funding; the discussion is based on a correlation analysis that is focused on the relationship between financial inputs on the one hand and patents and scientific publications on the other hand.