Highly educated skilled migrants are attracted to global cities: The case of Greek PhD holders

In this paper, we investigate to what extent highly educated skilled Greek migrants are attracted to global cities. With the use of a novel database, we find that highly educated Greek migrants are attracted more to cities indexed as global than to cities that are not indexed as global. Moreover, the more the international indexes that list a city as global, the greater the number of such migrants this city receives; that is, these migrants prefer to live in those global cities that are considered to have the most attributes to be classified as such. We provide information on which specific cities these migrants live in, thus filling a gap in the relevant literature. Our data further support a well-documented argument that there is a mutual beneficial relationship between skilled migrants and global cities to the extent that global cities create a favourable socio-economic environment that attracts highly skilled migrants.