The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has published an interesting article on economic mobility across Federal Reserve Districts. The economic mobility metric was defined as the probability that a child raised in the bottom fifth of the U.S. income distribution rose to the top fifth.
The authors found considerable variation in economic mobility across Federal Reserve Districts as the above figure demonstrates. “The Minneapolis District had the highest average mobility across districts. This is true even when excluding North Dakota and South Dakota, where some boom towns recorded extremely high mobility rates. (Doing so reduced mobility to 10.8 percent from 11.9 percent and the standard deviation to 3.2 percentage points from 4.8 percentage points.)”