In this paper, we study the dependence structure of some bivariate distribution functions based on dependence measures of Kochar and Gupta (Biometrika 74(3):664–666, 1987) and Shetty and Pandit (Stat Methods Appl 12:5–17, 2003) and then compare these measures with Spearman’s rho and Kendall’s tau. Moreover, the empirical power of the class of distribution-free tests introduced by Kochar and Gupta (1987) and Shetty and Pandit (2003) is computed based on exact and asymptotic distribution of U-statistics. Our results are obtained from simulation work in some continuous bivariate distributions for the sample of sizes \(n=6,8,15,20\) and 50. Also, we apply some examples to illustrate the results. Finally, we compare the common estimators of dependence parameter based on empirical MSE.