Bijective Enumeration and Sign-Imbalance for Permutation Depth and Excedances

We present a simplified variant of Biane’s bijection between permutations and 3-colored Motzkin paths with weight that keeps track of the inversion number, excedance number and a statistic so-called depth of a permutation. This generalizes a result by Guay-Paquet and Petersen about a continued fraction of the generating function for depth on the symmetric group S_n of permutations. In terms of weighted Motzkin path, we establish an involution on S_n that reverses the parities of depth and excedance numbers simultaneously, which proves that the numbers of permutations with even and odd depth (excedance numbers, respectively) are equal if n is even and differ by the tangent number if n is odd. Moreover, we present some interesting sign-imbalance results on permutations and derangements, refined with respect to depth and excedance numbers.