We present a discrete time stochastic volatility model in which the conditional distribution of the logreturns is a Variance-Gamma, that is a normal variance-mean mixture with Gamma mixing density. We assume that the Gamma mixing density is time varying and follows an affine Garch model, trying to capture persistence of volatility shocks and also higher order conditional dynamics in a parsimonious way. We select an equivalent martingale measure by means of the conditional Esscher transform as in Buhlmann et al. (1996) and show that this change of measure leads to a similar dynamics of the mixing distribution. The model admits a recursive procedure for the computation of the characteristic function of the terminal logprice, thus allowing semianalytical pricing as in Heston and Nandi (2000). From an empirical point of view, we check the ability of this model to calibrate SPX option data and we compare it with the Heston and Nandi (2000) model and with the Christoffersen, Heston and Jacobs (2006) model, that is based on Inverse Gaussian innovations. Moreover, we provide a detailed comparison with several variants of the Heston and Nandi model that shows the superiority of the Variance-Gamma innovations also from the point of view of historical MLE estimation.
