Abelian cocycles for nonsingular ergodic transformations and the genericity of type III1 transformations

The authors prove that in the space of nonsingular transformations of a Lebesgue probability space the type III₁ ergodic transformations form a denseG set with respect to the coarse topology. They also prove that for any locally compact second countable abelian groupH, and any ergodic type III transformationT, it is generic in the space ofH-valued cocycles for the integer action given byT that the skew product ofT with the cocycle is orbit equivalent toT. Similar results are given for ergodic measure-preserving transformations as well.Research supported in part by: Nat. Sci. and Eng. Res. Council #A7163 and # U0080 F.C.A.C. Quebec, NSF Grants # MCS-8102399 and # DMS-8418431.