Some measures of central tendency for financial asset values are reported with the median statistic. For example, the central values of single-occupancy homes in a community or region are commonly reported as median values rather than mean values. The authors explain in Chapter 2 that medians are less impacted by a few outliers in the data, and medians are also useful for describing central tendency in skewed distributions. For example, suppose most home values in a neighborhood are in the $250,000 to $300,000 range, but there are a few multi-million dollar mansions in the area. Here, the mean will be higher than the median due to the positive skewness in the value distribution, and the median will more closely represent the central value of homes in the community.

Can you provide examples of other asset values or financial data that exhibit skewness or outliers? Are the distributions for these data series positively or negatively skewed? Can you explain why the data series exhibit this skewness pattern?