Shanghai, one of the most developed cities in China, is implementing a pilot regional carbon emission trading scheme. Estimating the marginal abatement costs of CO2 emissions for the industrial sectors covered in Shanghai's emission trading scheme provides the government and participating firms useful information for devising compliance policies. This paper employs multiple distance function approaches to estimating the shadow prices of CO2 emissions for Shanghai industrial sectors. Our empirical results show that the overall weighted average of shadow price estimates by different approaches ranges between 394.5 and 1906.1 Yuan/ton, which indicates that model choice truly has a significant effect on the shadow price estimation. We have also identified a negative relationship between the shadow price of CO2 emissions and carbon intensity, and the heavy industries with higher carbon intensities tend to have lower shadow prices. It has been suggested that Shanghai municipal government take various measures to improve its carbon market, e.g. using the marginal abatement costs of participating sectors/firms as a criterion in the initial allocation of carbon emission allowances. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.