The excedances and descents of bi-increasing permutations

Starting from some considerations we make about the relations between certain difference statistics and the classical permutation statistics we study permutations whose inversion number and excedance difference coincide. It turns out that these (so-called bi-increasing) permutations are just the 321-avoiding ones. The paper investigates their excedance and descent structure. In particular, we find some nice combinatorial interpretations for the distribution coefficients of the number of excedances and descents, respectively, and their difference analogues over the bi-increasing permutations in terms of parallelogram polyominoes and 2-Motzkin paths. This yields a connection between restricted permutations, parallelogram polyominoes, and lattice paths that reveals the relations between several well-known bijections given for these objects (e.g. by Delest-Viennot, Billey-Jockusch-Stanley, Francon-Viennot, and Foata-Zeilberger). As an application, we enumerate skew diagrams according to their rank and give a simple combinatorial proof for a result concerning the symmetry of the joint distribution of the number of excedances and inversions, respectively, over the symmetric group.