section_path: Other markets
section_name: Other markets
paragraph_text: Other markets
  
  The model of supply and demand also applies to various specialty markets.The model is commonly applied to wages in the market for labor. The typical roles of supplier and demander are reversed. The suppliers are individuals, who try to sell their labor for the highest price. The demanders of labor are businesses, which try to buy the type of labor they need at the lowest price. The equilibrium price for a certain type of labor is the wage rate. However, economist Steve Fleetwood revisited the empirical reality of supply and demand curves in labor markets and concluded that the evidence is "at best inconclusive and at worst casts doubt on their existence." For instance, he cites Kaufman and Hotchkiss (2006): "For adult men, nearly all studies find the labour supply curve to be negatively sloped or backward bending." Supply and demand can be used to explain physician shortages, nursing shortages or teacher shortages.
  
  In both classical and Keynesian economics, the money market is analyzed as a supply-and-demand system with interest rates being the price. The money supply may be a vertical supply curve, if the central bank of a country chooses to use monetary policy to fix its value regardless of the interest rate; in this case the money supply is totally inelastic. On the other hand, the money supply curve is a horizontal line if the central bank is targeting a fixed interest rate and ignoring the value of the money supply; in this case the money supply curve is perfectly elastic. The demand for money intersects with the money supply to determine the interest rate.
  
  According to some studies, the laws of supply and demand are applicable not only to the business relationships of people, but to the behaviour of social animals and to all living things that interact on the biological markets in scarce resource environments.
  
  The model of supply and demand accurately describes the characteristic of metabolic systems: specifically, it explains how feedback inhibition allows metabolic pathways to respond to the demand for a metabolic intermediates while minimizing effects due to variation in the supply.