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I'm in my second year. Most of my classes are just introduction to a bunch of papers and models. I'm not sure what I should be gaining out of these papers. What are the skills I should be picking up?
To be more specific, I'm taking Labor, Public and Development Economics.
Since you use the academic-graduate tag, I assume you're talking about the second year in a graduate (presumably PhD) program. Congrats on making it past the qualifying/comprehensive exams!
In your second year and onwards, your focus should be on developing your own research agenda, and the courses you take will partially help you achieve that end. Your research will inevitably be built on existing work by others. The field courses (i.e. labor, public, development, or whatever else that's offered at your department) will help you survey the literature in the respective fields. In doing so, you will get an idea of what has been done in a particular field, and what remains to be done to close any gaps in our understanding of topics in that field.
Of particular importance in these courses is methodology. For example, you may not be interested in the issue of gender pay gaps, but by reading papers on that topic in your labor course, you may learn the tools of diff-in-diffs or RDD, which you can later apply in your paper on the effectiveness of political campaigns. Or perhaps you are not that into the topic of executive compensation, but your labor course may introduce you to the principal-agent model, which you later realize can be readily applied to studying the relationship between foreign aid providers and political elites in developing countries.
Ultimately, you need to have a clear idea of what you would like to do in terms of research, and choose your field courses accordingly. If you don't find labor/public/development sufficiently stimulating, go talk to the faculty in other fields in your department and see what they are working on. You may be able to do a reading course with them on papers and topics that you're truly interested in. Your department chair can probably refer you to the right faculty if you have a discussion with him/her about your current conundrum.
Of course, if research is just not your thing, it's more than okay to call it quits. In fact, it'd be better to quit earlier than later, since you'll start accumulating human capital in the other areas sooner (and waste less time on a non-productive activity).
As a grad student, anytime you read a paper my two pieces of advice are:
Make sure you understand the tools and methods. You may need to use them later in your own research. There are things most econometrics courses don't teach, but come up frequently in research (Conley standard errors is the first thing I think of). Important tools can be learned when reading.
Write down at least one research idea related to the paper, and keep a running list of your ideas. Even if the idea you write down is infeasible, bad, or simple, just write a research idea down. There are often ways to improve ideas later, and sometimes combining multiple ideas leads to a good research paper.
Finally, unless it is required for a course, it is often not a good use of time to read full papers. Often just reading the introduction is enough (abstracts aren't enough).
Good luck!
