Kishen Shastry

Kishen Shastry is an economist and PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Cambridge, with research interests in development economics, institutional economics, and political economy. His work engages closely with questions of institutional design, networks, and the economic implications of open digital systems. He holds an MPhil in Economic Research from the University of Cambridge, a Master’s degree in International Economics from the Geneva Graduate Institute, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Liberal Studies from Ashoka University. Kishen’s research includes work on religion, COVID-19, and mental health, with ongoing projects on the political economy of informal institutions in India and the economics of open transaction networks and digital public infrastructure. He previously worked on GDN’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) pilot, contributing to the programme’s early design and analytical framing. He is a Rising Leader Fellow at Aspen UK and an Adam Smith Fellow at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University.

Kishen is the Project Lead for GDN's programme on Open Transaction Networks. He can be reached at kshastry@gdn.int