In this article, we extend the notion of FP-injective modules to that of Cartan–Eilenberg complexes. We show that a complex $C$ is Cartan–Eilenberg FP-injective if and only if $C$ and $\text{Z}(C)$ are complexes consisting of FP-injective modules over right coherent rings. As an application, coherent rings are characterized in various ways, using Cartan–Eilenberg FP-injective and Cartan–Eilenberg flat complexes.

Let R be a ring and U a left R-module with S=End(RU). The aim of this paper is to characterize when S is coherent. We first show that a left R-module F is TU-flat if and only if HomR(U,F) is a flat left S-module. This removes the unnecessary hypothesis that U is Σ-quasiprojective from Proposition 2.7 of Gomez Pardo and Hernandez [‘Coherence of endomorphism rings’, Arch. Math. (Basel)48(1) (1987), 40–52]. Then it is shown that S is a right coherent ring if and only if all direct products of TU-flat left R-modules are TU-flat if and only if all direct products of copies of RU are TU-flat. Finally, we prove that every left R-module is TU-flat if and only if S is right coherent with wD(S)≤2 and US is FP-injective.

It is proved that if u is an element of a faithful algebra over a commutative ring R, then u satisfies a polynomial over R which has unit content if and only if the extension R ⊂ R[u] has the imcomparability property. Applications include new proofs of results of Gilmer-Hoffmann and Papick, as well as a characterization of the P-extensions introduced by Gilmer and Hoffmann.