  We present a systematic investigation of the role and importance of excitonic
effects on the optical properties of transitions metal oxide perovskites. A
representative set of fourteen compounds has been selected, including 3$d$
(SrTiO$_3$, LaScO$_3$, LaTiO$_3$, LaVO$_3$, LaCrO$_3$, LaMnO$_3$, LaFeO$_3$ and
SrMnO$_3$), 4$d$ (SrZrO$_3$, SrTcO$_3$ and Ca$_2$RuO$_4$) and 5$d$ (SrHfO$_3$,
KTaO$_3$ and NaOsO$_3$) perovskites, covering a band gap ranging from 0.1 eV to
6.1 eV and exhibiting different electronic, structural and magnetic properties.
Optical conductivities and optical transitions including electron-hole
interactions are calculated through the solution of the Bethe-Salpeter equation
(BSE) with quasi-particle energies evaluated by single-shot $G_0W_0$
approximation. The exciton binding energies are computed by means of a
model-BSE (mBSE), carefully benchmarked against the full BSE method, in order
to obtain well-converged results in terms of k-point sampling. The predicted
results are compared with available measured data, with an overall satisfactory
agreement between theory and experiment.
