The “14th Five-Year Plan” emphasizes that deepening the reform of the investment and financing system is an important measure to promote the formation of a market-oriented endogenous growth mechanism for investment. The online approval and supervision platform for investment projects simplifies approval processes, improves efficiency, and ensures transparency throughout the entire lifecycle of investment projects by establishing a normalized mechanism for data sharing and business collaboration. This provides institutional support for facilitating corporate investment and financing.

This paper uses the construction of provincial and municipal online approval and supervision platforms for investment projects since 2015 as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a staggered DID approach to study their impact on corporate investment-financing maturity match. The results show that the platform significantly alleviates investment-financing maturity mismatch. Mechanism testing reveals that the platform enhances the efficient coordination of investment and financing by curbing inefficient corporate investments and mitigating financing constraints caused by information asymmetry. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the corrective effect of the platform is stronger in firms with robust real investment demand, higher managerial risk preferences, greater labor investment efficiency, and lower access to bank loans. Additionally, the platform contributes to optimizing the regional business environment, guiding firms to shift towards real economic activities, and promoting high-quality corporate performance growth.

This paper makes the following contributions: (1) From the perspective of corporate investment-financing maturity match, it examines for the first time the impact and mechanism of the online approval and supervision platform on corporate investment and financing activities. (2) Grounded in the market-oriented reform of the investment system, it provides a new framework for understanding investment-financing maturity mismatch among Chinese enterprises from the perspective of the market-oriented delegation of investment rights, offering actionable policy insights for preventing systemic risks. (3) By focusing on the role of digital technology in enabling government function transformation, it effectively integrates the market-oriented reform of the investment system with the supply-side reform of finance, proposing clear policy recommendations for decision-making.