Governments provide technical, political, and financial incentives to encourage timber harvesting for the purpose of mitigating natural forest disturbance. To provide guidance concerning these incentives, this paper integrates a natural disturbance regime into a dynamic model of forest management. The model is used to estimate live and salvage timber harvest subsidies needed to incorporate disturbance-mitigating benefits before and after three types of natural disturbance: insect outbreak, storm, and wildfire. While not specific to a particular country or state, results indicate that the degree of forest mortality may be a poor metric for gauging management response due to various degrees of endogeneity across different types of disturbance events. The live timber harvesting subsidy is substantial but quickly declines after a disturbance event. In contrast, salvage subsidies increase following a disturbance event but remain modest. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. All rights reserved.