Variable "Skew"

Any discussion about what to do with a "highly-skewed" variable needs to immediately differentiate between "highly-skewed" dependent and independent variables. A "highly-skewed" (or "non-normally distributed") dependent variable (or, more accurately, as it relates to the errors) raises all the obvious questions when it comes to the appropriateness of an OLS regression specification given its underlying core assumptions. A highly-skewed independent variable, by contrast, raises none of these particular concerns. As one of the commentators notes (see discussion, and an illustration, here), in certain contexts a highly-skewed independent variable may simply reflect "just the way the data are."