Zeros of one-forms and homologically trivial fibrations

We show that a conjecture of Kotschick about one-forms without zeros on compact Kähler manifolds follows in the case of simple Albanese torus from a conjecture of Bobadilla and Kollár about homologically trivial fibrations. As an application, we prove Kotschick’s conjecture for compact Kähler manifolds X whose first betti number is at least 2dim(X)-2 and Albanese torus is simple.