A 63-year-old German economist has for decades falsely claimed an affiliation with the University of Maastricht, in the Netherlands, according to an article in tomorrow’s issue of Nature. The economist, Hans-Werner Gottinger, also appears to be a serial plagiarist, according to Nature’s report.

Mr. Gottinger’s deceptions began to unravel two months ago, after an attentive reader noticed that a paper he published in the journal Research Policy in 1993 had pilfered a string of complex equations from a 1980 issue of another journal. The editors of Research Policy started to sniff around — and their plagiarism investigation eventually turned into something much larger. When they contacted Mr. Gottinger’s ostensible employers in Maastricht, they learned that he had never worked there. According to Nature, Mr. Gottinger has claimed an affiliation with the Dutch university since the mid-1980s.

In a 34-year career, Mr. Gottinger has published works on ethics, statistics, environmental policy, and the economic effects of technological change. His most recent English-language book, Innovation, Technology, and Hypercompetition, was published last year by Routledge.

In 1999, Mr. Gottinger was hired as chairman of the economics department at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. (A trace of that appointment survives on an old catalog page.) But the post “lasted only a matter of weeks,” according to Nature, which did not provide any details on the episode.

Two years ago, Mr. Gottinger was a keynote speaker, alongside the Nobelist Thomas C. Schelling, at the annual meeting of the World Association for Sustainable Development. His biography has been scrubbed from the conference’s Web page, but this cached version describes him as “Director of the Institute of Management Science, University of Maastricht, the Netherlands, and Professor of Economics at the University of Osaka (KGU), Japan.”

The Osaka affiliation was also false, according to Nature. —David Glenn