Where do you have the best chance of climbing the economic ladder?
Try New Jersey or Maryland. Just don't go to Oklahoma or South Carolina.
Residents of eight states, primarily in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, have the best shot of moving on up, according to the Pew Economic Mobility Project, which just released what it calls the first state-level study on the subject.
But those living in nine southern states have the poorest chance of bettering their situations, the project found.
Economic mobility has entered the spotlight recently after the Occupy Wall Street movement called attention to the nation's growing income inequality problem. The growing divide between the haves and have-nots have led some to question whether the American Dream can still be achieved.
Pew found that it can still be, but where you live in America is a factor.
"Americans still believe in the American Dream and that equal opportunity should exist for all," said Diana Elliott, the project's research manager. "The differences show there isn't equal opportunity for mobility in every state."
The project looked at three different measures of economic mobility over a 10-year span:
--Absolute mobility, which examines residents' average earnings growth over the period.
--Relative upward mobility, which looks at the share of residents in the bottom half of the national earnings distribution who move up at least 10 percentiles.