Defensio of Negin Attar

On May 5, 2021, Negin Attar successfully defended her Doctoral thesis “PCAOB-type Regulation and Audit Portfolio” at the University of Graz, supervised by CAR’s Ralf Ewert. Negin was a DART student for four years and an active participant in several DART and international seminars. She’s currently employed as a PostDoc at the Johannes Kepler Universität Linz. Negin’s thesis studies the economic consequences of audit regulation and agency conflicts in three papers. First, she analyzes analytical and archival studies on PCAOB-type regulation. Second, she analytically examines under which conditions the benefits of the PCAOB regulations outweigh its costs born by inflexible audit standards. Last, she empirically studies how firms’ diversification affects audit fees.