About

Christian C. Blanco is an Assistant Professor of Operations and Business Analytics at The Ohio State University, a position he has held since 2017. His research domain is sustainable operations management, where he employs data and text analytics to address business and environmental challenges. He is recognized as one of the first scholars in his field to apply text analytics specifically within sustainable operations management. Additionally, he has extended the use of text analysis to other areas of operations management, including pharmaceutical manufacturing. His research contributions have been published in several prestigious journals such as Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Risk Analysis, Energy Policy, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, and Business Horizons. Blanco joined the Operations and Business Analytics department at the Fisher College of Business after earning his Ph.D. in Decisions, Operations and Technology Management from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2017. Prior to his doctoral studies, he was involved with the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab at UC Berkeley, where he collaborated with a team of scientists to develop a mathematical model called “SWITCH.” This model identifies the least-cost combination of energy technologies to provide low-carbon electricity across 11 western states. His academic background also includes studies at Carnegie Mellon University as a Ph.D. student in Engineering and Public Policy and undergraduate degrees in Applied Mathematics and Environmental Economics and Policy from UC Berkeley.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Economics
• Environmental economics
• Natural resource economics
• Marketing
• Industrial organization
• Microeconomics
• Finance
• Econometrics
• Accounting

Selected publications

• Marketing scholarship and environmentally-sustainable retailing: a two-stage framework for greener consumption and production

  Journal of Retailing · 2026-04-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Vessel sharing and its impact on maritime operations and carbon emissions

  Production and Operations Management · 2022-04-11 · 32 citations

  articleOpen access

  The shipping industry touches approximately 90% of all international trade, producing roughly one billion tons of greenhouse gases each year. Changes in the operations and coordination of global‐shipping vessels can have a substantial impact on vessel's carbon emissions, but these efforts need to fulfill the service expectation of individual firms receiving consignments. We examine the associated gains (or losses) in operational efficiencies and environmental benefits (if there are any) from vessel sharing. We do so by analyzing a dataset that merges multiple years of U.S. port records and maritime emissions data. Using simultaneous regression equation models, our results indicate that the maritime emissions (attributable to receiving firms) drop by 5%, on average, for each additional carrier sharing a vessel. We confirm several operational efficiencies emerging from vessel sharing, such as increased average utilization and reductions in “route redundancy.” These operational changes mediate the total effect of vessel sharing on emissions. However, we do find that vessel sharing is associated with a slight increase in lead time, measured as the number of days it took to deliver the goods. Although our empirical setting is in the global shipping industry, asset sharing is a mechanism that can be adopted by any industry. Our findings show the importance of exploring the conditions and settings where sharing may or may not have operational and/or environmental trade‐offs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Classification of Carbon Abatement Opportunities of Global Firms

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2022 · 30 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Econometrics
  • Environmental economics

  Problem definition: Carbon abatement opportunities are diverse, making it difficult to classify them. Do latent classes of carbon abatement opportunities exist and is there a type that is financially and environmentally superior? Methodology/results: In this study, we classify 16,525 implemented carbon abatement projects using text analysis. We benchmark our clustering method to the latent Dirichlet allocation model and verify our classifications using a crowd-sourcing platform. We then compare the payback period, financial hurdle (measured in upfront cost), savings, and carbon emissions reduction by type. Our results show that latent classes exist, and they statistically differ in the metrics we examine. Our regression results show that the type of project explains more of the variation in the financial and environmental outcomes than the firm-level financial controls we included. We find that liquidity (measured using cash-to-asset and current ratios) is associated with the number of reported projects, but the magnitude and direction varies by type. Our extension shows that marginal abatement costs statistically differ by type with a few exceptions. Lastly, we show that our classification is robust to sector-level variation. Managerial implications: Although the results show that no single type of opportunity dominates in all four metrics, our classification provides a ranking of the types firms should pursue depending on their goals. Our results suggest that firms likely place different weights across these four metrics. This means that policies targeted at making investment costs more attractive (e.g., subsidies or better financing) may not have the same impact on firms that put more weight on savings compared with those more sensitive to costs. A classification of opportunities can contribute toward understanding whether a unifying theory or pattern across carbon abatement activities may exist or not.

  PublisherDOI

• Operations in the upper echelons: leading sustainability through stewardship

  International Journal of Operations & Production Management · 2021-10-25 · 22 citations

  article

  Purpose Top-level operations leaders can drive organizational performance across a broad range of pro-environmental objectives. The authors’ focus is on understanding which specific leadership competencies are most conducive to green performance outcomes. The authors further consider the influence of Lean thinking on the importance of these competencies. Design/methodology/approach In study 1, of a multi-method investigation, the authors interview executive search professionals, on how green objectives impact top-level operations leadership searches. In study 2, the authors adopt a multi-attribute choice task to examine how Lean thinking impacts competency preferences. Finally, in study 3, the authors merge secondary data on corporate environmental performance with a survey of top-level operations managers’ assessments. This triangulating multi-method approach provides an integrated and holistic view into these dynamics. Findings Results show particularly strong associations between resource and energy management outcomes and the specific leadership competencies of stewardship. This set of leadership competencies play the greatest role when Lean thinking is deficient. Research limitations/implications While the authors’ focus is on top-level operations managers, and their under-explored impact on environmental performance, such an impact represents only one dimension of corporate social responsibility (CSR) that these managers may be critically influencing. Practical implications The associations uncovered in this research suggest critical leadership characteristics to consider in developing and recruiting top-level operations managers, when specific environmental objectives exist. Social implications The study’s findings draw attention to the importance of leadership characteristics among influential corporate decision-makers, instrumental in the environmental progress of firms. Originality/value This work fills a critical gap in the authors’ understanding of how top-level operations managers influence green corporate objective, and how their contributions are valued across settings.

  PublisherDOI

• Supply Chain Carbon Footprinting and Climate Change Disclosures of Global Firms

  Production and Operations Management · 2021 · 105 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Natural resource economics

  The content of climate change disclosures of large, global companies evolved from 2007 to 2016. Within that window, the same set of firms started measuring and disclosing their supply chain carbon emissions. Does carbon footprinting influence the nature and content of a firm's disclosure on the climate change risks that are expected to affect its business? We explore this question using more than 10,925 climate change disclosures collected by the CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) from 2,003 firms worldwide. We use singular value decomposition and text similarity scores to quantitatively examine the content of the CDP disclosures from 2007 to 2016. Using fixed effects and dynamic panel models, we find that measuring supply chain carbon emissions (Scope 3) explains a substantial shift in the content and nature of the disclosures. We find no evidence that measuring and disclosing direct emissions (Scope 1) are associated with substantial changes in the content of the disclosures. One explanation for this is that most of the climate change‐related risks are in the supply chain, not within the company boundaries of large, global firms. Our results show the importance of encouraging firms to voluntarily measure their supply chain carbon emissions if they are not yet aware of their contribution and exposure to climate change. Our work shows that firms’ response to climate change is dynamic, and it may take a decade to detect these shifts.

  PublisherDOI

• Do carbon abatement opportunities become less profitable over time? A global firm-level perspective using CDP data

  Energy Policy · 2020 · 35 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Environmental economics
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

• Managing Safety‐Related Disruptions: Evidence from the U.S. Nuclear Power Industry

  Risk Analysis · 2019-03-29 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Low-probability, high-impact events are difficult to manage. Firms may underinvest in risk assessments for low-probability, high-impact events because it is not easy to link the direct and indirect benefits of doing so. Scholarly research on the effectiveness of programs aimed at reducing such events faces the same challenge. In this article, we draw on comprehensive industry-wide data from the U.S. nuclear power industry to explore the impact of conducting probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) on preventing safety-related disruptions. We examine this using data from over 25,000 monthly event reports across 101 U.S. nuclear reactors from 1985 to 1998. Using Poisson fixed effects models with time trends, we find that the number of safety-related disruptions reduced between 8% and 27% per month in periods after operators submitted their PRA in response to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Generic Letter 88-20, which required all operators to conduct a PRA. One possible mechanism for this is that the adoption of PRA may have increased learning rates, lowering the rate of recurring events by 42%. We find that operators that completed their PRA before Generic Letter 88-20 continued to experience safety improvements during 1990-1995. This suggests that revisiting PRA or conducting it again can be beneficial. Our results suggest that even in a highly safety-conscious industry as nuclear utilities, a more formal approach to quantifying risk has its benefits.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An inside perspective on carbon disclosure

  Business Horizons · 2017-06-21 · 55 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The state of supply chain carbon footprinting: analysis of CDP disclosures by US firms

  Journal of Cleaner Production · 2016-06-25 · 127 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Elliot Bendoly

  The Ohio State University

  8 shared

• Charles J. Corbett

  7 shared

• Felipe Caro

  University of California, Los Angeles

  7 shared

• Terry L. Esper

  The Ohio State University

  4 shared

• Jane Iversen

  The Ohio State University

  4 shared

• Daniel G. Bachrach

  2 shared

• Yong Yin

  Doshisha University

  2 shared

• Hyunwoo Park

  Pusan National University Yangsan Hospital

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• OSU Sustainable Supply Chain Grant 2022
• FDA Broad Agency Announcement: Quality management and drug q…
• National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Convergent…
• OSU Fisher Leadership Research Grant 2020
• FDA and the NIPTE, Manufacturing Sector Research Initiative…