The analysis attempts to empirically examine the effects of regulatory changes in the rigidity of labor regulations in general and of different types on both unemployment rates in general and gender differences in labor force participation rates. It does so taking advantage of three different types of labor regulations, those on hiring workers in the short run, hours worked and vacation time, and on firing workers. While in the extended portions of our paper, we engage in some interesting examples in which the effects of individual country reforms are evaluated from the perspective of synthetic control experiments by comparing the reforming country’s pre-and post-reform labor market outcomes with a number of similar countries but which did not undertake the reform under study. This is an approach that we have already applied to individual countries based on the well-known synthetic control analysis. In that approach, it is essential to focus on countries which all lacked reforms in the pre-reform period and only one country reformed over the relevant post-reform period under consideration. It is also subject to a kind of selection bias, focusing on a particular country making a reform revealing an especially strong effect on a market outcome. However, having followed the trends in labor regulations over time across the world, we have found that these assumptions are quite unrealistic. In this paper, we make use of a newer and more realistic situation in which more than one country may be making reforms and others may be reversing reforms over the period deemed relevant to evaluating the effects of these regulatory changes. Specifically it draws on an algorithm for conducting Diff-in-Diff regressions with time and region fixed effects and somewhat varying pre and post-treatment trends in which more than one country may be changing their regulations over the period under study.