Principles of Economics

Reviewers tell us that Case/Fair/Oster is one of the all-time bestselling POE texts because they trust it to be clear, thorough and complete. Case/Fair/Oster readers also come away with a basic understanding of how market economies function, an appreciation for the things they do well, and a sense of things they do poorly. Readers begin to learn the art and science of economic thinking and begin to look at some policy and even personal decisions in a different way.

Karl E. Case is Professor of Economics Emeritus at Wellesley College where he has taught for 34

years and served several tours of duty as Department Chair. He is a Senior Fellow at the Joint

Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University and a founding partner in the real estate

research firm of Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss, which produces the S&P Case-Shiller Index of home

prices.He serves as a member of the Index Advisory Committee of Standard and Poor’s, and along

with Ray Fair he serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Before coming to Wellesley, he served as Head Tutor in Economics (director of undergraduate

studies) at Harvard, where he won the Allyn Young Teaching Prize.He was Associate Editor of

the Journal of Economic Perspectives and the Journal of Economic Education, and he was a member

of the AEA’s Committee on Economic Education.

Professor Case received his B.A. from Miami University in 1968; spent three years on active

duty in the Army, and received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1976.

Professor Case’s research has been in the areas of real estate, housing, and public finance. He

is author or coauthor of five books, including Principles of Economics, Economics and Tax Policy,

and Property Taxation: The Need for Reform, and he has published numerous articles in professional

journals.

For the last 25 years, his research has focused on real estate markets and prices.He has authored

numerous professional articles, many of which attempt to isolate the causes and consequences of

boom and bust cycles and their relationship to regional and national economic performance.

Ray C. Fair is Professor of Economics at Yale University. He is a member of the Cowles

Foundation at Yale and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He received a B.A. in Economics

from Fresno State College in 1964 and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1968. He taught at

Princeton University from 1968 to 1974 and has been at Yale since 1974.

Professor Fair’s research has primarily been in the areas of macroeconomics and econometrics,

with particular emphasis on macroeconometric model building.He also has done work in the areas

of finance, voting behavior, and aging in sports. His publications include Specification, Estimation,