Asian Crisis and the Exposure of Large United States Firms Emmons, William R. Schmid, Frank A. corporations economic conditions economic crises stock market conditions ICPSR.XVIII 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. 2000-05-02 1217 10.3886/ICPSR01217.v1 Asia ICPSR metadata records are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/).