Giorgio Farace

Hello! My name is Giorgio Giovanni (but everybody calls me Giorgio) and I am a PhD candidate in political economy at the University of Chicago, working on formal theory. Starting in July 2026, I will join the Stanford Graduate School of Business as an assistant professor of political economy. 

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 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. The third chapter studies denunciation and asks how broadly rulers should define the units within which silence is punishable.

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!