While a Master's student, I worked in the research department at Statistics Canada on LifePaths. I examined how the simulation model's immigrants compared to the experiences of real immigrants using the Census and Labour Force Survey data. The goal was to determine how well the model performed on these new Canadians.
See the report here.
During my Master's I came up with a twist on the traditional shift-share method. Rather than look at changes the level of employment across industries and regions, we looked at the change in occupations across regions. We focused on the regions of Alberta during a resource boom period. Our work resulted in a paper.
Brox, J., E. Carvalho, and J. MacKay. 2010. “Regional Employment Changes in a Booming Resource Economy: A Modified Shift-Share Analogue Regression of Changes in Employment Patterns within the Economic Regions of Alberta.” Canadian Journal of Regional Science 33(2): 25–44.
See my research page for more recent examples.