Today I read 7.2 The Jackknife in Stastical Computing with R and found the explanation for why the jackknife estimate of standard error have the factor is unclear. I refered to An Introduction to the Bootstrap by Bradley Efron and R. J. Tibshirani, and the slides of jackknife by Rozenn Dahyot to figure out the reason. Here is my understanding for the existence of factor .
The jackknife samples are computed by leaving out one observation from a sample at a time: for . The th jackknife replication of the statistic is Thus, for , we have
The jackknife estimate of standard error is defined by where .
The exact form of the factor in the above formula is derived by considering the special case . For , it is easy to show that Therefore, where is the unbiased estimate of the standard error of the sample mean, and is unbiased estimate of the standard deviation of the population.
The derivation suggests that the factor os exactly what is needed to make equal to the unbiased estimate of the standard error of the sample mean . It is a somewhat arbitrary convention that uses the factor , as in fact, the factor is derived by considering the special case .