We prove that many, but not all, injective factors arise as crossed products by nonsingular Bernoulli actions of the group $\mathbb {Z}$. We obtain this result by proving a completely general result on the ergodicity, type and Krieger’s associated flow for Bernoulli shifts with arbitrary base spaces. We prove that the associated flow must satisfy a structural property of infinite divisibility. Conversely, we prove that all almost periodic flows, as well as many other ergodic flows, do arise as associated flow of a weakly mixing Bernoulli action of any infinite amenable group. As a byproduct, we prove that all injective factors with almost periodic flow of weights are infinite tensor products of $2 \times 2$ matrices. Finally, we construct Poisson suspension actions with prescribed associated flow for any locally compact second countable group that does not have property (T).