We define the co-spectral radius of inclusions ${\mathcal S}\leq {\mathcal R}$ of discrete, probability- measure-preserving equivalence relations as the sampling exponent of a generating random walk on the ambient relation. The co-spectral radius is analogous to the spectral radius for random walks on $G/H$ for inclusion $H\leq G$ of groups. For the proof, we develop a more general version of the 2–3 method we used in another work on the growth of unimodular random rooted trees. We use this method to show that the walk growth exists for an arbitrary unimodular random rooted graph of bounded degree. We also investigate how the co-spectral radius behaves for hyperfinite relations, and discuss new critical exponents for percolation that can be defined using the co-spectral radius.

We study the behavior of the co-spectral radius of a subgroup H of a discrete group $\Gamma $ under taking intersections. Our main result is that the co-spectral radius of an invariant random subgroup does not drop upon intersecting with a deterministic co-amenable subgroup. As an application, we find that the intersection of independent co-amenable invariant random subgroups is co-amenable.

We prove a lower bound on the difference between the spectral radius of the Cayley graph of a group $G$ and the spectral radius of the Schreier graph $H\backslash G$ for any subgroup $H$. As an application, we extend Kesten’s theorem on spectral radii to uniformly recurrent subgroups and give a short proof that the result of Lyons and Peres on cycle density in Ramanujan graphs [Lyons and Peres. Cycle density in infinite Ramanujan graphs. Ann. Probab.43(6) (2015), 3337–3358, Theorem 1.2] holds on average. More precisely, we show that if ${\mathcal{G}}$ is an infinite deterministic Ramanujan graph then the time spent in short cycles by a random trajectory of length $n$ is $o(n)$.