The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is the most widespread model, used to determine the cost of capital of firms and estimate expected stock returns. In this model, the most important parameter is the beta, which defines the magnitude of exposition to market returns, for a particular asset. The objective of this essay is to evaluate beta stability of a vast amount of shares in the Brazilian stock market in three highly volatile periods: the Asian crisis in 1997, the financial market turmoil before 2002 presidential elections and the 2008 financial crisis. The sample included 55, 79 and 172 companies, respectively. Each crisis cycle was then divided into three periods of 52 weeks and then the stability of their betas was measured using regressions with dummy variables and Chow tests. We have reached similar results for the crises analyzed, indicating that between 11 percent and 27 percent of the companies changed their betas when comparing pre-crisis and during crisis periods, with a 95 percent confidence level. Nevertheless, by comparing pre-crisis and post-crisis periods, most of the companies that exhibited change in their betas when entering the crisis, did not reject the stability hypothesis. These results indicate that, as expected, betas tend to be stable in the long term.