  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.
