His paper is really good.
No
It makes one wonder how real the R&R was in the first place. This group of ESP/ARG APs from Northwestern seem to use inflation of CV as their strategy to play the tenure game. None of them succeeded.
Example: As of today, Javier Donna lists (in his CV) an R&R at ReStud coauthored with Espin-Sanchez, but Espin-Sanchez doesn't even mention this phantom paper as a working paper in his CV. Then, for Donna, below the long list of R&R's the actual publications are just a couple of Economics Letters and a Rand. They also have other R&R with NU friends - Schenone, Veramendi, etc. - but who knows what's real. Seniors at thier places are not stupid. Veramendi and Schenone failed tenure at ASU. Donna and Espin-Sanchez will probably follow.
I doubt people can easily list a false R&R and get away with it. Any editor in that journal can look up the status of that paper and see that it is not R&R. If an editor pointed out that someone was making a fake claim of having an R&R that would have catastrophic career repercussions. It might be grounds for being fired.