1 Abstract -- 2 Introduction -- 3 Chapter I: Literature on the subject of excess volatility -- 4 Chapter II: Excess volatility beyond discount rates -- 5 Chapter III: Evidence of excess volatility in the Eurozone market -- 6 Conclusions.

The role of expectations for economic fluctuations has received considerable attention in recent business cycle analysis. We exploit Markov regime switching models to identify shocks in cointegrated structural vector autoregressions and investigate different identification schemes for bi-variate...