10.3886/ICPSR01217.v1 Emmons, William R. Schmid, Frank A. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research 2000 corporations economic conditions economic crises stock market conditions 2000-05-02 2000-05-02 1217 1 A deep financial and economic crisis ravaged many Asian nations during 1997 and 1998. In this article, the authors examine the impact of the crisis on corporate risk for a subset of large United States firms that are included in the Standard & Poor (S&P) 100 stock market index. They find that the Asian crisis changed many of these firms' exposure to stock market movements -- that is, their "betas," or sensitivity to stock market risk. In particular, the extent of a firm's sales exposure to Asia appears to be an important link through which the crisis affected beta. This effect is amplified by greater financial leverage.