The stable cohomology of the Satake compactification of $\mathcal{A}_g$

Abstract

Charney and Lee have shown that the rational cohomology of the Satake-Baily-Borel compactification the moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension g stabilizes as g grows and they computed this stable cohomology as a Hopf algebra. We give a relatively simple algebro-geometric proof of their theorem that also takes into account the mixed Hodge structure that is present here. We find the latter to be impure.