Giorgio Farace

Hello! My name is Giorgio Giovanni (but everybody calls me Giorgio) and I am an assistant professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. I expect to receive my PhD in political economy from the University of Chicago in summer 2026.

My job market paper studies how punishing people for the actions of their peers encourages self-policing within groups. Collective punishment creates a trade-off: it strengthens "horizontal deterrence" by giving people incentives to police one another, but weakens "vertical deterrence" because obedience no longer guarantees protection from punishment. 

The rest of my dissertation develops informational explanations for collective punishment. The second chapter studies denunciation and asks how broadly rulers should define the units within which silence is punishable. Punishing silence elicits information only under two-sided ignorance: the ruler must be uncertain about the disobedience observed by group members, while group members must be uncertain about the disobedience already detected by the ruler. Denunciation regimes are therefore optimal only at intermediate monitoring capacity. The third chapter studies punishment when rulers observe only how many people obey, not who obeys. The obedience-maximizing rule is bang-bang: punish if and only if obedience falls below a cutoff. This cutoff must coincide with a mode of the distribution it induces (it must be "self-modal"), so frequent repression is a structural feature of optimal deterrence, not evidence of weak control. 

My interests also include election manipulation and social choice theory.

Before coming to Chicago, I earned an MPhil in Politics from Oxford and a BSc in International Politics and Government from Bocconi.

Please feel free to reach out!