The literature on the economic returns of sustainable production choices is already very rich. However, it still does not lead to any conclusive evidence pertaining to its economic consequences.One of the first contributions arguing in favour of the potential positive effects of environmental innovation (EI) comes from the seminal paper by Porter and van der Linde (1995), which postulates that environmental regulation is not necessarily detrimental to firms' performance. When environmental policies are well designed, regulation-induced innovation may generate positive effects in the long run, leading to ‘win–win’ solutions that counterweigh the costs of compliance. Jaffe and Palmer (1997) articulate the hypothesis in its narrow, weak and strong characterizations, and it is only under the latter that efficiency gains achieved by an ‘induced innovation’ can completely offset the loss of competitiveness that has been caused by compliance (to policy) costs. A broad strand of empirical literature has focused on assessing the competitiveness effects of environmental regulation, or, in other terms, the strong version of the Porter hypothesis, which indirectly or directly passes through innovation, or more precisely, EI adoption, and this is where the current work is positioned. Likewise, the natural-resource-based view of the firm hypothesizes that firms' profitability and competitiveness can be positively affected by EI through the competitive advantages that are created once accounting for the natural environment surrounding the firm.Overall, the existing literature agrees that the question ‘does it pay to be green?’ needs to be better qualified in terms of any sustainable production choice that is considered. Leaving environmental policy behind the scenes of the empirical analysis, and given the focus on a single country (Italy), the current work focuses on innovation activities directed towards circular economy practices to understand whether short-term economic gains (or losses) exist associated with those activities.More precisely, we answer the question of which type of green practice has to be adopted to generate positive economic returns among EIs for a circular economy (CE-related EI). We contribute to a very recent and still developing literature, needing confirmation and empirical evidence, on the potential benefit of the circular economy for firms (Dey et al., 2020; Khan et al., 2021). We aim to fill the gap in the research area on the relation between CE-related EI and economic performance, and contextually, we shed further light on the more general relation between EI and firms' economic performance. To do that, we rely on a unique dataset for a sample of approximately 3000 Italian manufacturing firms.The organization of the paper is as follows. The next section discusses the general conceptual modes through which EIs and CE influence firms' economic performance, developing the research questions. Section 3 illustrates the empirical strategy and discusses the results.