This paper investigates the auditors’ responses to the readability of annual reports, which are important sources of information for auditors in their audit planning and pricing decisions. Using unique audit fee and hour data for Korean listed companies, we find that hard-to-read annual reports are positively associated with audit fees and audit hours. However, no empirical association exists between annual report readability and hourly fee rates. These findings imply that while auditors exert additional effort to reduce the audit risk embedded in unclear annual reports, they do not charge a higher fee premium. We further show that the association between annual report readability and audit variables (i.e. audit fees and hours) is most salient at the initial engagement but becomes weaker as the auditor tenure increases. The findings of this paper contribute to the literature on the auditors’ reactions to the clarity of annual reports.

This study investigates the effect of co-CEO structure on asymmetric cost behavior. A firm’s cost behavior reflects managers’ decision making about resources, which can be influenced by various factors. One of them relates to a manager’s decision to inefficiently reallocate their company’s resources when sales decline in pursuit of their incentives for empire-building and disincentives for downsizing. These inefficient resource allocations may result in asymmetric cost behavior, and ultimately be harmful to a firm’s sustainability. We consider the co-CEO structure as an alternative corporate governance mechanism that prevents managers from making inappropriate decisions. By doing so, we investigate whether the degree of cost stickiness differs between co-CEO and single-CEO structures, and whether the former complements external governance mechanisms, particularly foreign ownership, in mitigating cost stickiness. We analyze data from Korean listed companies for 2000–2013, and find that the cost stickiness is lower in the co-CEO structure than in the single-CEO structure. Thus, the co-CEO structure works as an alternative corporate governance mechanism to control the agency problem by inducing mutual monitoring among co-CEOs. Furthermore, the reduction in cost stickiness is greater for firms with higher foreign ownership, indicating that the co-CEO structure complements external governance mechanisms.