Distributional limit theorems in infinite ergodic theory

We present a unified approach to the Darling-Kac theorem and the arcsine laws for occupation times and waiting times for ergodic transformations preserving an infinite measure. Our method is based on control of the transfer operator up to the first entrance to a suitable reference set rather than on the full asymptotics of the operator. We illustrate our abstract results by showing that they easily apply to a significant class of infinite measure preserving interval maps. We also show that some of the tools introduced here are useful in the setup of pointwise dual ergodic transformations.