Existence of common and upper frequently hypercyclic subspaces

We provide criteria for the existence of upper frequently hypercyclic subspaces and for common hypercyclic subspaces, which include the following consequences. There exist frequently hypercyclic operators with upper-frequently hypercyclic subspaces and no frequently hypercyclic subspace. On the space of entire functions, each differentiation operator induced by a non-constant polynomial supports an upper frequently hypercyclic subspace, and the family of its non-zero scalar multiples has a common hypercyclic subspace. A question of Costakis and Sambarino on the existence of a common hypercyclic subspace for a certain uncountable family of weighted shift operators is also answered.