st: Identify Closest Subsequent Date

[Julia Laskorunsky <jal549@psu.edu>]

Hi everyone,

I have unique ID#s which list a court date and several release dates
(0 to 7). I would like to ask Stata to identify the closest subsequent
release date to the court date of interest. I have asked Stata to
convert all date variables to elapsed format.  Here is an example of
the data (sorry if the formatting gets messed up):


ID  cdate    release1   release2   release3
1   16705   16799       18502           .
2   15088   15000            .                 .
3   16805      .                  .                 .
4    16000    15222      15899       16452

Is there a way to generate a variable that identifies a subsequent
released date (if there is one) to the court date? In the example
above the variable would identify:

ID  clsdate
1     16799
2         .
3         .
4      16452

Using Stata 12. Thanks for everyone's help.

Julia
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