  Semivariance is a measure of the dispersion of all observations that fall
above the mean or target value of a random variable and it plays an important
role in life-length, actuarial and income studies. In this paper, we develop a
new non-parametric test for equality of upper semi-variance. We use the
U-statistic theory to derive the test statistic and then study the asymptotic
properties of the test statistic. We also develop a jackknife empirical
likelihood (JEL) ratio test for equality of upper Semivariance. Extensive Monte
Carlo simulation studies are carried out to validate the performance of the
proposed JEL-based test. We illustrate the test procedure using real data.
