A spectral decomposition for the Bolthausen-Sznitman coalescent and the Kingman coalescent

We consider both the Bolthausen-Sznitman and the Kingman coalescent restricted to the partitions of { 1 , … , n } . Spectral decompositions of the corresponding generators are derived. As an application we obtain a formula for the Green's functions and a short derivation of the well-known formula for the transition probabilities of the Bolthausen-Sznitman coalescent.