[R-SIG-Finance] labour statistics

[Max]

Hi everyone,

This is not so much of an R question as a statistics question. I 
currently work for the largest pre employment screening company in 
Canada. Upper management has noticed that noticed that usually a month 
or so before any big kind of economic shock happens, that our incoming 
files (requests for a background check) jump up or down.

As the company statistician, they've asked me to see if the 
relationship is strong enough to put together a product that can be 
sold to any kind of firm or organization (brokerages or any kind of 
investing firm, federal ministry of finance, statistics canada (like 
the bureau of stats in the USA), universities etc) that would be 
interested in knowing what's going on with the federal labour 
statistics before Stats Canada does.

In Canada on the 10th of every month, statistics canada releases labour 
statistics for the previous month. The way CFO sees it, *ideally* on 
the (1st to 10th, something like that) every month, the firm I work for 
could be releasing data for the rest of the month.

What I'm trying to figure out is if you were in the position of 
evaluating the final product for purchase, what kind of information 
would make the product credible/viable? Summary statistics? Variance 
covariance matrices? Graphs of the data? Cross Correlation matrices for 
time series analysis?

It's frustrating because I can see a noticeable relationship between 
our file volume and the unemployment rate (in particular,) but I'm not 
sure how to appropriately frame it in a way that another 
statistician/modeler would want the data.

Any suggestions, comments, questions would be great.

thanks!

-Max