In economy, banking sector has been considered as the main issue for development. Using panel data analyzing to test the relationship between banks performance and economic freedom indexes for 9 emerging market countries in Asia, the paper¡¦s result shows that there is the positive effect between monetary freedom, business freedom, financial freedom and banks performance while investment freedom has a negative impact. It suggests that emerging market countries¡¦ government and the policy maker need to focus deeply on the operation, the efficiency of regulation and improving the economic freedom.

This thesis consists of five essays dealing with the fee and commission income in European banks from the macro, sector and bank level perspectives. This topic is of high relevance since fee income represents the largest part of the non-interest income of EU banks. The first part of the thesis deals with banks in general terms, while the second part is focused solely on cooperative banks, which represent approximately 20% of the EU banking sector. We compare the magnitude of the bank fee income across EU countries and study its determinants and impacts on banks' performance. The first essay compares the magnitude of the fee income across EU countries with a special emphasis on the Czech Republic from a macroeconomic perspective. First, we conclude that Czech banks are not abnormally dependent on fee income and their outstanding performance can be attributed to sound risk management, high liquidity and sufficient capital buffers rather than to excessive fees. Second, our evidence suggests that the share of fee income had an increasing trend in EU countries in recent years, which might be connected to the effort to maintain sufficient profitability in the low interest rates environment. We also discuss how new entrants, the so called low-cost banks, changed the banking sector in the Czech Republic....