Karl Case

Karl Edwin "Chip" Case (November 5, 1946 – July 15, 2016) was Professor of Economics Emeritus at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States, where he held the Coman and Hepburn Chair in Economics and taught for 34 years. He was a Senior Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University and was President of the Boston Economic Club 2011-12. Professor Case was also a founding partner in the real estate research firm of Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss, Inc., which created the S&P Case Shiller Index of home prices. He served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Depositors Insurance Fund of Massachusetts. He was a member of the Standard and Poor’s Index Advisory Committee, the Academic Advisory Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Board of Advisors of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard University. He served as a member of the Boards of Directors of the Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corporation (MGIC), Century Bank, The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association. He was also an Associate Editor of The Journal of Economic Perspectives and The Journal of Economics Education.

Professor Case received his B.A. from Miami University in 1968 and spent three years on active duty in the Army including a tour in Vietnam. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1977. At Harvard University, he served as Head Tutor (Director of Undergraduate Studies) and won the Allyn Young Teaching Prize.

His research was in the areas of real estate, housing, and public finance. He is the author of numerous articles and studies on boom and bust real estate cycles, and is author or co-author of five books including Principles of Economics (1986), Economics and Tax Policy (1986) and Property Taxation: The Need for Reform (1978). Principles of Economics, a basic economics text co-authored with Ray C. Fair and Sharon Oster, first published in 1989, is in its ninth edition and is used at more than 500 colleges and universities.

Case’s research on housing markets and prices began with a New England Economic Review article published in 1986 entitled “The Market for Single Family Homes in Boston: 1979-1985.” In that paper Professor Case constructed a crude “repeat sales” index to isolate appreciation from mix effects in measuring changes in house values. The model presented in that paper showed that fundamentals explained only a small part of home price movements in the Northeast between 1979 and 1985. The paper conjectured that the region had experienced a home price bubble.

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