The difficulty clearly comes because X and Y are corellated (I assume (X,Y) is jointly gaussian, as Aniko) and you can't make a difference (as in @svadali's answer) or a ratio (as in Standard Fisher-Snedecor "F-test") because those would be of dependent χ2 distribution, and because you don't know what this dependence is which make it difficult to derive the distribution under H0.
My answer relies on Equation (1) below. Because the difference in variance can be factorized with a difference in eigenvalues and a difference in rotation angle the test of equality can be declined into two tests. I show that it is possible to use the Fisher-Snedecor Test together with a test on the slope such as the one suggested by @shabbychef because of a simple property of 2D gaussian vectors.
Fisher-Snedecor Test:
If for i=1,2 (Zi1,…,Zini) iid gaussian random variables with empirical unbiased variance λ^2i and true variance λ2i, then it is possible to test if λ1=λ2 using the fact that, under the null,
It uses the fact that
R=λ^2Xλ^2Y
follows a
Fisher-Snedecor distribution F(n1−1,n2−1)
A simple property of 2D gaussian vector
Let us denote by
R(θ)=[cosθsinθ−sinθcosθ]
It is clear that there exists
λ1,λ2>0 ϵ1,
ϵ2 two independent gaussian
N(0,λ2i) such that
[XY]=R(θ)[ϵ1ϵ2]
and that we have
Var(X)−Var(Y)=(λ21−λ22)(cos2θ−sin2θ)[1]
Testing of Var(X)=Var(Y) can be done through testing if (
λ21=λ22 or θ=π/4mod[π/2])
Conclusion (Answer to the question)
Testing for λ21=λ22 is easely done by using ACP (to decorrelate) and Fisher Scnedecor test. Testing θ=π/4[modπ/2] is done by testing if |β1|=1 in the linear regression Y=β1X+σϵ (I assume Y and X are centered).
Testing wether (λ21=λ22 or θ=π/4[modπ/2]) at level α is done by testing if λ21=λ22 at level α/3 or if |β1|=1 at level α/3.