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 permutations of n elements. In terms of weighted Motzkin path, we establish an involution on the permutations 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.