Measurable rigidity of the cohomological equation for linear cocycles over hyperbolic systems

We show that any measurable solution of the cohomological equation for a Hölder linear cocycle over a hyperbolic system coincides almost everywhere with a Hölder solution. More generally, we show that every measurable invariant conformal structure for a Hölder linear cocycle over a hyperbolic system coincides almost everywhere with a continuous invariant conformal structure. We also use the main theorem to show that a linear cocycle is conformal if none of its iterates preserve a measurable family of proper subspaces of R^d. We use this to characterize closed negatively curved Riemannian manifolds of constant negative curvature by irreducibility of the action of the geodesic flow on the unstable bundle.