A week after the Occupy Wall Street movement protested economic inequality in May Day rallies across the U.S., a study found that the ability to become rich may depend on where you live.

Residents of three East Coast states -- Maryland, New Jersey and New York -- were the most likely to move up the earnings ladder from the bottom and the least likely to fall from the top, according to a study released today by Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonpartisan research organization based in Washington. Louisiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina had the worst prospects for so-called economic mobility.

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Determining why states or regions performed the way they did was beyond the study’s scope, said Elliot, who worked on the report with Erin Currier, who oversees the Economic Mobility Project. Important drivers of economic mobility at the national level include educational attainment, savings and assets, and neighborhood poverty during childhood, she said.

On an individual level, people who moved from the state in which they were born had better-than-average financial mobility, the study found. More than two-thirds of Americans remain in their birth states throughout their lives, Elliott said.

The most recent data the study used was from 2007, so it’s unclear what impact the recession that began in December of that year may have had since, Elliot said. 

Read the full article at bloomberg.com.