Recent imperfect capital market theories predict the presence of asymmetries in the variation of small and large firms risk over the economic cycle. Small firms with little collateral should be more strongly affected by tighter credit market conditions in a recession state than large, better...

Markov switching models with time-varying means, variances and mixing weights are applied to characterize business cycle variation in the probability distribution and higher order moments of stock returns. This allows us to provide a comprehensive characterization of risk that goes well beyond...