It has been empirically observed that aspect-oriented (AO) decompositions promote the modularity and the design stability of software systems containing crosscutting concerns. However, most of this existing empirical research has focused on the positive and negative impacts of AO programming in the modularization of crosscutting concerns in the context of normal control flow of programs. Consequently, most of these works do not account for the exceptions that may flow from aspects: when an aspect adds a new functionality to specific points in the code, this additional behavior may also bring new exceptions. An aspect also has the ability to handle exceptions that were previously handled inside the base code. Moreover, the exceptions that escape form aspects also flow inside the program, and may lead to unexpected error-prone scenarios, such as: unintended handler actions and uncaught exceptions. This thesis presents an empirical study to evaluate the impact of aspects on the exception flow of programs. To support the reasoning about the flow of exceptions on AO programs, a static analysis tool called SAFE (Static Analysis for the Flow of Exceptions) was implemented. Based on data empirically collected during the study we characterized a catalogue of bug patterns related to the exception handling code of AO programs. To help AO developers to check the reliability of the exception handling code, this work presents verification approach - supported by the SAFE tool - which provides guidelines to counter these bug patterns. Our findings show that the exception handling code in aspect-oriented programs tends to be error-prone, but that a verification approach based on static analysis can lead to significant improvements.