While there is a large body of empirical studies on the relationship between crude oil price changes and stock market returns, they have failed to achieve a consensus on this subject. in this paper, we combine wavelet analysis and Markov Switching Vector Autoregressive (MS-VAR) approach to explore the impact of the crude oil (CO) shocks on the stock market returns for UK, France and Japan over the period from January 1989 to December 2007. Our procedure involves the estimation of the extended MS-VAR model in order to investigate the importance of the resultant wavelet filtering series (after removing random components) in determining the behavior of the stock market volatilities. We show that CO shocks do not affect the recession stock market phases (except for Japan). However, they significantly reduce moderate and/or expansion stock market phases temporarily. Moreover, this negative relationship appears to be more pronounced during the pre-1999 period. The empirical findings will prove extremely useful to investors who need to understand the exact effect of international oil changes on certain stocks prices as well as for policy managers who need a more thorough evaluation about the efficiency of hedging policies affected by oil price changes. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.