Longtime Wellesley resident Karl “Chip” Case’s passing this past week at the age of 69 has been marked with remembrances honoring the former Wellesley College economics professor’s seminal work on housing market trends. Case had been sick for the past several years.
Case is best known in the business world for the widely used Case-Schiller Index for measuring home prices. The headline on Case’s obituary in the Boston Globe describes it as “an invaluable house price index.”
A memorial on the Wellesley College website says that “During the course of his 34-year career at Wellesley College, he taught more than 4,000 students. His teaching focused on urban economics, real estate markets and real estate finance, and public finance. He taught principles of both macro and microeconomics, intermediate microeconomics, statistics, econometrics, and the history of economic thought.”
The Wall Street Journal also pays its respects to Case here. Yale economist Robert Schiller — the Schiller in the Case-Schiller Index — told the Journal that “I admired his down-to-earth economics.”