Characteristics of a Top Paper

From Prof. Nick Bloom's Labor Economics syllabus (Winter 2015):

In my view successful papers need to do at least two of the following three things: (1) Have excellent motivation (that is answer an important question – a good test of this is would a paper, say the New York Times, find the results interesting enough to write up); (2) Have excellent measurement (often using a new dataset, sometimes assembled by the author – this would be new data, rather than say the 1000th paper using Compustat or the CPS); and (3) Have excellent identification (showing clear causation, often with a natural or field experiment).