Past experience suggests many businesses are likely to compress margins and to rely on automation to reduce costs rather than fully passing on price increases.
12 In the December Duke CFO Survey, roughly one-half of chief financial officers from large firms and about one-third of those from small firms reported “using, or planning to use, automation or technology to reduce  Regarding compression of margins and pass-through of wage increases to prices, see Ekaterina V. Peneva and Jeremy B. Rudd (2017), “The Passthrough of Labor Costs to Price Inflation,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, vol.