Karl "Chip" Case, the co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller Index of home prices, has died at 69.
Case died after a long illness, according to his obituary in The Boston Globe. A memorial service for Case will take place in the fall at Wellesley College, where he was a professor of emeritus of economics.
Case is best known for the home price index that bears his name, which he created with Yale economist Robert Shiller. The two academics met in the 1980s and went on to co-author a number of papers on housing bubbles. Case created a method of studying repeat home sales to find pricing trends, while Shiller applied his knowledge of behavioral finance and economic bubbles.
The popular home price index was borne from a study the two conducted on four cities in California during a housing boom, and now studies housing market dynamics in 20 cities along with a national composite.
Case and Shiller formed the company Case Shiller Weiss in 1991 with Allan Weiss and began producing the index until the company's sale to Fiserv in 2002, according to The Wall Street Journal. Fiserv went on to create tradable indices with Standard & Poor's based on the index's data. CoreLogic later bought the Case Shiller Weiss from Fiserv in 2013, according to Reuters.
For 34 years, Case worked in the economics department at Wellesley before retiring in 2010. When Shiller won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2013 for his research on asset pricing, Case was his honored guest at the award ceremony in Stockholm, The Wall Street Journal noted.
