Larry Ball has has written quite a bit in favor of trimmed-mean inflation estimators over the years. In this 2024 paper for the Journal of Money and International Finance, he and co-authors Carvalho, Evans, and Ricci take a look at the performance of median inflation for 38 nations. A number of these nations exhibit persistent asymmetry in their component price data, meaning that in order to produce an unbiased estimator, the medians have to also be computed asymmetrically.

In addition to an improvement in monthly and quarterly efficiency, they find that the median measures provide improved fit with simple Phillips-curve models of inflation.