Yes, I love writing inspirational posts about getting back on the saddle after a journal rejection, never giving up, work hard to make the paper better, etc. Even the thought of giving up on a paper hurts my heart. We work so hard on all of our papers--we watch them grown from just an idea, to a few tables, to an actual completed paper. How can we give up on any of them? They're all our babies!
Conclusion: don't give up on them. But it's fine to let them rest for a while. While you work on other things. It may be that the time away can clear your head. You may come up with a better way to motivate the analysis or a nice empirical method to address identification issues. When you get back to it, you may just be more excited to work on the project.
Academic Sequitur has a really nice blog entry to help you decide whether it's time to store a paper in the filing cabinet for a while. What I like best about the advice is the emphasis on point that you should only put a paper in the filing cabinet if you have more promising papers to work on in the meantime. I also like the part at the end that all papers get annoying after a while (especially after a few rejections)---you can't afford to give up on all of them.
I would add one small note: be mindful of your coauthors. They have worked on the paper quite a bit a bit, too. Even if it may make sense for you to work on other projects, it may not be fair to them.
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